You know, I’ve started trying to get a job now after University is finished and at the same time I’ve been looking at other designer’s portfolio and showcase. Some of them are really amazing, but I noticed a flaw in the system.
How can employers judge weather to hire you because you have a “nice looking” portfolio or to hire someone else who has an “average” looking portfolio but the someone else has much better knowledge and builds much better standards and accessible website?
This thought came to me as I was looking at some web designer’s portfolio in comparison to web developer’s portfolio. Where one has better graphics talent than the other but the other has better knowledge in accessibility and to my surprise there are many web designers who still chooses to build pages that does not pass standards validation tests but the graphics talent makes their personal site so much more pleasing and amazing that I would assume make anyone forget about standards :P. You know what I’m saying?
Well, it’s just as well I have confidence in my design as well as programming. Oh, I just submitted a new deviation to deviantart ;), I’ve also been checking my profile and it seems I’m building up quite a lot of interest from people, 3 submissions and plenty of page views. Well I guess I’m trying to push in this far-eastern post-modernist style into my art which isn’t something you see everyday. 
Direct from the site:
“Songbird™ is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up. Like Winamp, it supports extensions and skins feathers. Like Firefox®, it is built from Mozilla®, cross-platform and open source.”
Go onto their site and see their demo, it looks quite good. Very handy for the end user to grab songs on all kinds of sites and play them on your own computer and even record it for your own use.
BUT
What is the legal implications for this. As a concerned web designer, Songbird seems to unrestrictively download all songs that it files from a page in order to “stream” it to the end user straight away. This means a huge server and bandwidth load for the person/site concerned and as a site owner myself, I do not approve of automated downloading and I feel Songbird is treading in dangerous grounds. In this day and age, where even google was sued for caching contents of sites, it is not a good idea.
Maybe I got it wrong, but that’s what it seems like from their screencast anyway. I guess those who want to protect their content on the site would place it behind a php link and link to a directory that cannot be easily guessed.. i.e. using anti-hotlinking.
Anyhow, I admit I did not even try the software, but this is a first impression critic. If it proves true, then it is a critic of them in general, if it isn’t true then it is a critic of the information they’ve conveyed to me.
More and more people are using black gradient and light green as their design identity now-a-days, the latest adopter I’ve noticed since I came back from Canada yesterday was at my local Marks and Spencer. Indeed, this colour combination is a very sleek design but over the top usage is making it seem like just a cheap copy of the original (whoever that may be).
With that in mind, I’m going to use a different colour combination for the next generation layout for this site, my laptop is out for repairs however and so I can’t commence on working on the next generation design yet. I’m thinking of using a black background with orange/yellow and bits of white, that’s always been my favourite combination of colours starting from my very first website. Black is always much easier on the eye to focus on the content and ignore the background, after that you just need a combination of bright colours to show the content that really matters and orange is a very good highlighting colour imo. while white on black is the best contrasting colours.
