Evaluation
Overall I'm pretty happy with my Portfolio website. I integrated a lot of the After Effects lessons in to the Hero banners of the website. This resulted in the website looking much smarter and professional because of it. I also made a logo in After Effects which turned out really well. All the things I used in the Adobe softwares turned out good and boosted the professionalism of the website by a lot. Another tool that helped do this was https://www.bestcssbuttongenerator.com/. A button maker website. I wanted to make the user be able to do more than just turning each page on my Portfolio, so I added these buttons that we'd been taught to make a few weeks before breaking up for the Christmas holidays. The two buttons I added would take the user to my college's home page site and the other would take you to outlook. All of these tools helped a lot when making the site. My Portfolio would’ve looked basic without them.
My Portfolio buttons
These were the two buttons I made through https://www.bestcssbuttongenerator.com/. Here I could modify the button to fit the way I wanted it. Like I said at the top of this page, the buttons gave more control for the user when browsing the website. I went with the colour blue for both of these buttons for uniform so that they looked like they'd belong on the same site. Rather than going multi coloured on each button and making each page look a lot different from the other. I didn't have any issues when making and adding these to the site. We just had to copy and paste the code of the buttons and add the links of the website we want the buttons to direct the user to. Because we had been tought how to do this before the Christmas holidays I knew what to do before making the website. Maybe I could've made the buttons exactly identical but I think this is alright. The colours are enough to make the buttons in uniform to each other.
Hero banners
The Hero banners were crucial to my Portfolio. My main Hero banner that I used was the one with my logo was probably the most important Hero banner. Each one was made in Adobe After effects. These took a while to make. For every single one of my After Effects animations on my Portfolio I've used the position coordinates to move the images in the clip.
I also used the scaling to enlarge and shrink images which was a pretty useful tool. For the majority of my After effects animations I'm happy with the way they've come out but I i'm really happy with my hero banners. I think my main logo especially. After playing around with the particle effect was able to create the background for my main Hero banner. I think this turned out brilliantly. maybe I could've tried to add this background to the rest of my Hero banners but I feel like this would make the pages more laggy. So in some ways it's good that I didn't do that. Because there's nothing moving other than the background for this banner it runs really well.
Logo
I made my logo in Adobe Photoshop using shapes and text as well as the magnetic lasso tool. I decided to use Photoshop as it's quite a creative software, allowing you to use a lot of tools to create whatever image you have in mind. When planning for my Logo I decided to use Brentford football club's badge. This is the football team that I support so there was some inspiration in to making this badge.
I took the colours used from the badge and made the red darker, I also took the borders used and made them thicker for my own logo. I don't think my logo is as good as Brentford's but I think it's still good. When you look at it you get an idea that the logo represents something to do with computers and video related, which is the impression I wanted to give. The parts that show this in the logo is the laptop in the middle and the word 'productions', used at the bottom of the logo. I think if I was to re-do my logo I'd make the red brighter and the borders of the logo thinner just like Brentford's and also make the text white. I think it would look much cleaner. More professional.
Layout
The layout of the site is pretty good. My main goal when it came down to this in my site was make sure that I use up the white space. I didn't want to have big white gaps in between the content on the pages, that wouldn't look good for my Portfolio. I think I did a good job at making sure of that though. There's nothing I would do to solve that problem if I had to do the project again, especially since it's not an issue in my website. For my layout I also added a border at the bottom of each page on my website. A lot of top websites have these. Usually terms of service and contact is under here. Because of this I decided to copy this tradition by doing the same with a link to outlook.
Mine might not have as many links but I think that's fine considering one website is a market and the other is a portfolio about someone. There wouldn't be a terms of service on my Portfolio. I also used Hero banners which are also very popular for website layouts. Traditionally they're at the top of the website so that's where I also located mine. Hero banners usually show some of what the page has to offer on the site.
Website video
For my website video I had to talk about my struggles and experiences with the site. I also had to screen record while doing this so I had a lot of options with how I wanted to record this. The way I ended up recording this was through the apple built in screen record function. I used this because I use a MacBook Pro to create and type everything so it was convenient. I used a snowball microphone which I borrowed from College to go with the screen recording. This helped provide a good quality sound recording to go with the footage. I wanted to make my voice to be heard well. After the recording session I exported the files in to Adobe Audition so that the audio could be a fixed a bit. Then I exported it again in to Adobe Premiere Pro for the visuals to be cut and given some effects.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with the outcome of my website video explaining the different aspects of it and how everything was made. I felt it was necessary in the video for me to the add image effects. It gives information on what the software I was using looked like, as well as what tools I was using in those apps. After having it looked at by my teacher there were no improvements that were needed of my video. I didn't have too much trouble over this project, I found Google sites a struggle when uploading videos/images to the site. This was because all images uploaded had to be Gif's so that complicated things and they had to be smaller than a file size of 47.8 gigabytes. I found this annoying as I would have to try and compress my files. This could lowered the quality of my work depending on how the files were compressed. This was the only real struggle I had with this project. Luckily none of my compressed work was ruined in any way.
Im really proud of the hero banners. I think they work really well with my Portfolio. It makes the pages enjoyable to look at. I used a lot of tools from Adobe After Effects to create these. I had no trouble making these, though when it came to adding this on to the site I had trouble compressing some of the After Effects work. Along with the Hero banners I also really liked the buttons I made for the site, it adds more movement and control for the user when going through the site. I didn’t have any trouble with making the buttons so that really helped. There was a lot of work I really liked that I added to my Portfolio but I thing the Hero banners and the buttons were my favourite simply because I think they came out better than I expected. When making them I had no plan of what I wanted to do. So I surprised myself a bit. Next time I will probably pre-plan every single Adobe work because although my work turned out really good I think it could probably be even better and maybe speed up my work. This is something that I will work on for future projects and side work. The Hero banners still look amazing and I'm proud of the work that I have made.