I'm working on a new product for writers called Boldfaced. Its goal is to help writers of all kinds show off their best work, by giving them a great-looking portfolio designed for showing off the written word. If you're a writer, I'd love to have you get set up, and to hear your feedback. Longer term, my goal is to facilitate connections between great writers and great gigs.<p>Signup here: http://www.boldfaced.net/signup<p>Sample profile: http://simon.boldfaced.net/<p>Feedback: kyle at elepath dot com
I like the name, the typography's decent, and I'm fond of that shade of green. The layout is very, very messy. It feels like a poorly-styled tumblelog, what with the huge emphasis on snippets and the constant centered-ness of everything.<p>For some reason, the linear display of one quote after another doesn't work for me at all. It feels loose. A portfolio should feel denser, like it's bursting with interesting things everywhere you look. But perhaps that's just the ugliness of the centered-quotes approach.<p>But seriously, rethink the quotes-only approach. Writing is about so much more than quick snippets. I know plenty of brilliant writers who would be grossly underserviced by this approach – Gene Weingarten and David Foster Wallace are two authors whose styles are drastically different but which are each difficult to "snippet" meaningfully. Your challenge, if you want to make a site like this, is to make a site that <i>respects</i> writing, as deeply and as thoroughly as is possible without sacrificing snappiness and elegance.<p>That said, you're working on something that would make the Internet a better place -- oh wait! I just realized you're from Elepath! Is this an official Elepath project then? That's neat, and good luck to you and Jakob and the rest of the team.
In my opinion, you should left justify the quotes, make the color of the quotes a dark body color, and then make the clients' names in the lovely shade of green.<p>When substantial text is centered, it does add emphasis, but it also reduces readability. When the entire page is centered, there's less readability but no gain in emphasis. And it is the same case, more or less, with color; a strong color is strong only in contrast to a more subtle color. The key is not to overload on strong elements (like alignment, text decoration, and odd fonts) while emphasizing which elements really need to stand out.<p>It does sound like a great idea!
Sound like a great idea, good luck!<p>I often read a paragraph or two from a book just to get the feel of it, so if your site would display those, people like me could use it as a sort of discovery engine for book or authors.<p>In terms of design - take a look at changemakrs.com, they're doing a good job at presenting content (quotes, in their case) in a very appealing way.