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Connecticut is packed with old-growth forests. Old leafy trees with long branches, the kind that don’t do well in high winds. So when the tropical storm winds hit, branches came down. In some cases, actual trees came down. Right in front of my house, in fact!

There’s a bunch of tall trees around my apartment-home, and I watched some of them shaking in the wind. It was scary. There was really nowhere safe to park my car because just about every possible spot is in striking range of one big tree or another. So while I’m nervously keeping watch of the tall trees behind my house, which could hit my car, a massive double-tree, the kind where one massive old tree forks into two also-large trees about 7 feet up, snapped like a pencil.

You have no idea what that sounds like. It was like a long chain of thunder, rushing air, clattering branches, whooshing leaves, more thunder, a powerful th-WHACK, and then complete darkness as the power went out. And then you hear it hit the ground again on the bounce. Somewhere in there was also the sound of another tree being snapped by the impact, a telephone pole being snapped either by impact of by whip-lash effect, and several lines being snapped because that tree hit them hard. All of that compressed into 3 seconds. Quite the sonic buffet!

Fifteen minutes later the other half of the double-tree came down. Repeat all of what I said above, but this time it’s all happening in total darkness. Here’s what it looked like in front of my house the next day.

Downed lines blocking the driveway.

A carpet of leaves

See that part where the trees are hanging on the power lines? Look under that. See the splintered thing underneath it? That's the telephone pole. It also snapped completly off up higher, above where the power lines connect to it. Yes, the impact of the tree on the power lines whiplashed the telephone pole so bad it broke in two places.

That part where you see the exposed core of the tree, where it snapped. That's at least 7 feet up. I'm 6'5", and if I stood in the street, I could walk under the felled tree without stooping over.

Four days later a tree removal crew finally showed up.

The cats handled it pretty well, of course.

So anyway, I had no power for 5 days. It’s a special kind of loneliness to be broke, unemployed and unable to sleep at 1 a.m. surrounded by total darkness as far as the eye can see. I had a AA-battery-powered LED lantern instead of a flashlight, but that doesn’t chase away the darkness in your soul.

I felt the need to be dramatic, there. Hope you liked it. Those LED-bulb lanterns are highly recommended, by the way. I let mine run for (I’m guessing) 8 hours a day and it never burned out its first pair of batteries. I’ll never use a mag-lite again, at least not around the house.

Anyway, I DREW SOMETHING. Just once I was able to scrape the motivation together during the few hours my room actually had enough light in it during the day. Seriously it was a narrow space of time.. I have one window in my room, it is small, it has no direct line to the sun because of those tall shady trees I mentioned above, so during the day my room never really gets enough light. But I was ready on day 2, and I had been charging my iphone with my portable car-jumping-kit, so I had some photo reference available, and I cranked out one of my marker sketches! We’ve reached the end of our story, so here’s the sketch.

Okay, that one wasn’t markers, it was pencils.

I started this at a diner, then hopped a bus, screwed up my transfer and had to walk the last mile home, mostly up hill. That was not fun for my big fat out-of-shape arse. Felt good after I got home and rested a bit. That’s when I finished it off.

I should walk more.

This question keeps coming up and it’s going to keep coming up. There’s lots of resources out there on how an artist or designer should design their portfolio website, and many of them are very good, but almost-universally they gloss over an issue at the core of the thing — namely how you present your actual work.

Most people consider this a non-issue. Thumbnails linking to larger images. That’s just how it’s done, right?

My opinion? No. Bad dog. No thumbnails. And I’ll explain why.

Thumbnails are an artifact. They were born in the days of 28.8k baud phone modems, when downloading a 76k jpg could take a minute or two. Getting an image that would today be considered small and light-weight represented a real time investment back then. If you put 10 of those on one page, the page would take forever to load and there was a good chance that the browser, and perhaps the computer, would crash from the strain. Thumbnails were a way of letting people choose what they spent that time waiting for.

I remember those days. My computer had 8 megabytes of memory. Now it has 4,096. That’s powerful math. Oh, and the memory itself is many times faster, too.

These days, virtually everyone has a DSL-class internet connection or better. My cell phone gets data many times faster than that old desktop, and it does so wirelessly. The same scenario above, a page with 10 images at around 75K each, has been trivialized. Server lag (“Waiting for reply”) at the beginning of each page load is now the most common cause of long load times. It makes much more sense now to just load everything at full size — within reason, of course. You still shouldn’t be auto-loading 3000 x 2000 pixel images, but you knew that, didn’t you? Of course you did.

But there are still thumbnails. It kinda drives me nuts. You load the page with thumbnails on it, click a thumbnail, and wait until another page with just that photo on it loads. You see the image. Great. Now you have to hit the back button and wait for the index page to load again. Now repeat that process for every image you want to see. It gets annoying quick. Thumbnails have become a way of inflicting unnecessary wait time on your users, rather than avoiding it.

Now imagine yourself in the shoes of an Art Director.

This whole philosophy came to me because of Irene Gallo, who’s kind of a big deal in Illustration circles. She’s the head Art Director at Tor Books in New York City. She gives a whole lot of work, and thus a whole lot of money, to illustrators. She’s also heavily involved in the Society of Illustrators. She’s got the kind of connections that a freelance artist could only dream of and a couple years back she started a twitter account. Almost right after I did, in fact. I found her twitter account because of her blog, which was also new, and I was a frequent visitor at the time. In her first month on the service, she did what everyone else does on twitter, she complained about work. Specifically she complained about how frustrating it was navigating portfolio websites. Thumbnail galleries were driving her nuts.

Art directors work on deadlines. Hard deadlines. Constant deadlines. They have a limited amount of time to find a suitable artist for a given project, and hundreds, maybe thousands, of potential artists to choose from. This process has gotten easier thanks to the internet — no more stacks of portfolio prints to sift through — but virtually every artist site sends you rattling over the speed bumps of a thumbnail index.

I asked Gallo to clarify her statement on artists’ sites being a pain, and what she’d prefer them to be like. She started by saying basically what I covered in the previous two paragraphs, and that this was a common problem for art directors. As for what would be better, she shocked me. “Blogspot,” she said. Specifically, having all the images just showing up on one page where she can scroll down and see them one after another without having to click on anything, except maybe a ‘next page’ link if they’re interested — though, to be honest, the decision to use you on something probably happens on that first page.

She went on to say she was so annoyed at Artist’s sites that if she’s in a hurry and sees Blogspot in the url of it, she’s more likely to go look at it because she knows that browsing the portfolio will be quick and easy.

Here’s an example of a Blogspot artist’s site. [new window]

Here’s another. [new window]

I’m not crazy about Blogspot, but I’m smart enough to get the message and to take what’s good about the Blogspot portfolios and integrate that into something elsewhere. There’s no reason not to go the Blogspot route, though. Incidentally, Tumblr didn’t exist back when this short twitter conversation happened, and might be at least as good a choice (if not better) now, in my opinion, if you want something simple to set up. Tumblr sites tend to look much nicer.

There is also WordPress.com, which runs on the popular and versatile WordPress blogging platform. If you’re interested in a more powerful solution but don’t have the technical chops to set it up yourself, WordPress.com is a good solution: it’s all set up already for you, you just pick a theme and go, much like Tumblr but with more options.

Here’s an example of a scrollable portfolio not on Blogspot, with bigger images and I think a better layout for a portfolio, though it could use a little more space between the items to keep them clearly separated. (It’s a graphic design site, not illustration.)

So why do people still use thumbnails? I think it boils down to two reasons:

One: It’s how it has always been done. Past experiences define future expectation. The web, in the past, always had image galleries done with a thumbnail index, so people approach modern ones with those thumbnail galleries as the default method. That’s how it’s been, so that’s how it’s gonna be. No, not necessary any more, stop being lazy. Use your brain.

Two: Fancy presentation. This actually has some merit behind it, and it’s where you will have to make your own decision about whether it’s right for you. Every artist is told in school, in society, etc, that they should put a lot of work into the presentation of their art, not just the art itself. Framing, specifically, is seen as almost important as the work itself.. and the old thumbnail gallery paradigm encourages that kind of presentation online. The thumbnails can be given a frame of their own, turning the thumbnail gallery into something resembling a real meat-space gallery wall, seen from 20 feet away. It can be a very nice effect. Then click on one to see it zoomed in and that entire page becomes that image’s frame. Done right, this can be a very classy way to present your work, and it feels very nice and familiar for an artist, but it still has the problems from above, and a busy Art Director who spends hours upon hours looking at these websites every week may not be so enamored with your precious presentation of an art gallery metaphor. They’re more concerned about the work itself and don’t want to wait for page loads. However, if you’re more of a fine artist, the sort whose work appears in galleries and your primary audience is art collectors, not busy art directors, then a fancy presentation might be the better option.

Artists and designers have adapted with newer technology, of course, and thus the lightbox was born. A lightbox is a way to show a full-sized image superimposed over a thumbnail gallery without actually loading a different web page. Some of these lightboxes pre-load the images when the page is first loaded, some wait until a specific image is clicked on (thus inserting a short wait before each image is seen, but less of a wait than an entire page load would bring). This is one way to get over the faults of an old-fashioned thumbnail gallery, but it still lacks the ease of something scrollable, without thumbnails.

Some of these lightboxes have fancy animations that feel great to the artist, but add even more wait time and frustration to the audience. It seems neat and fancy the first time someone sees it, but by the fifth time it can begin to drive you crazy.

Some of them just pop the image up instantly – which is better, but it still means more clicking, more moving the mouse around the page to click on boxes to close the light box, then hunting for another thumbnail, slowing down and complicating the viewing process, but you still have the benefits of a nice presentation.

So really this boils down to what’s more important? Ease of use or presentation? Or maybe you can have it both ways? That would be ideal, but it’s a tricky design tight rope to walk. If it’s your first time designing a portfolio, you might want to pick one priority and pursue that.

Here’s an example of an image gallery on Tumblr that is scrollable but has superb presentation and framing of the artwork. This Tumblr site is based on a paid theme available on their service. (They have free ones too.)

Personally, my feeling is that if you’re trying to get work, the way you feel about your portfolio is unimportant. It is not an art gallery in the real world, it is a web site. Websites are meant to be used, not viewed. The audience is what matters, and as such I feel that the priority is ease of use for them. Give them a scrolling gallery with big, high quality images of your work, accompanied with brief but complete information about each piece. Think about your most important audience — people who might give you work —  and about their needs. They need a little context for each piece:

1. Why did you do it?
2. What was the intention?
3. What was it for?
4. What media did you use?
5. Was it digital?
6. If so, what software did you use?
7. Did you do a pencil drawing first or did it start and end in pixels?
8. If it’s traditional media, what was the original work’s size?
9. When did you do this?

Also, see what I did there? Lists are much easier to digest and understand than free prose. Use lists when it comes to some of that info.

Example:

[Description Text here, keeping it short and sweet, no more than a couple sentences. Imagine it as something that you want to convey in two Twitter messages or less.]

• Client: Hokum Pokum Books
• Produced digitally (Adobe Photoshop) from pencil drawing
• Completed July, 2010

There’s other ways to enhance the presentation of a scrolling gallery. Give each item plenty of white space. Look around at some of the themes on Tumblr for example. Some of them automatically box each post elegantly in something that looks like a sheet of curled paper laying on a flat surface. Elegant, attractive and scrollable. That’s what you want.

I hope this helps.