Inspiration: Osvaldas Valutis
Osvaldas Valutis – www.osvaldas.info
I first came across this portfolio sometime last year after someone I know who was writing up an essay about the page metaphor in web design had pointed me towards it as a “unique idea”. Basically because if you go to the website then you will notice that as you navigate the website it doesn’t refresh the page and give you a new page (and thus a new URL), instead it uses AJAX to change the content (well, what I assume is AJAX as I can’t think of another way to do it off the top of my head).
Although I still hold the view that a page change is better than what this site does for naviagting content I still like the idea – just not the execution. I think that people need to navigate some elements of a site on a page by page basis, (e.g. on this site, the “index”, “about”, and “work” pages) but that AJAX elements can be used very effectively in other areas (e.g. The portfolio items). Theres also the problems it creates with accessibility, SEO (you only have one page that can be indexed in search engines) and a few other things that I could go on about, but I guess those are things that not everyone really thinks about while making a website (and things that some wouldn’t think matter that much for a portfolio website).
Saying that, after hearing about the site I kept noticing it being talked about in other places (e.g. web design forums and blogs that I look at), and generally people were praising it, so maybe my opinions are wrong and he is infact innovitave and we will see lots more websites not using page to page navigation in the future, who knows?
As for the design of the portfolio, I quite like the whole “sketchy notebook” style it has, but I’m not entirely sure if I like the floral sections at the top and bottom. Okay, they look good, I will give him that, but what do they have to do with the rest of the design?
Although I was more meaning the portfolio site itself is inspirational, he does also create some pretty neat freelance work that you might like to check out. Personally, I quite like some of the logos he has created.
i think he’s using simple CSS/JQuery techniques to achieve this so called inspirational look. what he does is that he has all of his content in his index.html and hides most of it as a default.
i wouldn’t recommend this method, as it forces the user download data that might not be needed. although it’s not too much, but i’m one of those W3C guys, you know
Yeah, I know what you mean. Still looks good though (even if it isn’t functional).
Actually, I can think of a few ways he could have made this site more functional (e.g. loading in the extra data using AJAX – even if it means storing everything, including layout data, in the database).