Working on my own website - initial thoughts

Content

The main thing I want to display on this website is my vector work, which is mostly scattered drawings done in my spare time for my own entertainment, with the occasional piece for college thrown in. However, I also have a series of works I created for a club night - some are illustration, some are photography. Finally, I have a selection of collage based illustrations and the occasional monster made of fimo that I would like to show. So I will have to consider how I present my work - should it be by media? Or by purpose? Or some other method?

Other things I will need to include is some kind of contact page, and possibly some way of informing people when new work is added. An interesting thing to investigate would be to see if I could develop a way for viewers of the website to interact and communicate, but I'd probably only consider this if I had enough time.

Design

There are two ways that I could go when it comes to the design of this website. As Sue put it, it can either be a frame for existing work or a piece of art in itself - something functional and clean, or something more stylised.

One website I really enjoy the look of is that of the Decemberists. With the lead singer having settled down with an illustrator, the band has a fairly strong musical and design theme that has run throughout their albums, and the website reflects this with a handwritten menu and headers, a slightly yellowed background colour (like old paper) and flash-animated illustrations in the same sorts of colours and inky style. The whole website carries this sort of antiquated style which supports the band's own identity.

However, I still also enjoy the clean style of Slowly Downward (which I described in an earlier post, so I shall have to investigate both.