To be conventional or unconventional...?

On many levels, Seth M. Gitner, multimedia journalist, has a unique portfolio site for a photographer, one that challenges convention just enough to stand out. However, conventions become conventions by being intuitive, user friendly and reducing user frustration. Some conventions aren’t worth breaking.

As a reader settles into Gitner’s homepage, the first impression is refreshingly more relaxed than its sobering, photojournalistic counterparts. The photographer’s name—white and sans serif—drapes a square, muted image of run down cars, and thick gray bars ground the top and bottom of the interface as a place to stow navigation. While the square interface sets the site apart from a traditional rectangular portfolio site, it leaves little room for displaying large format images, a huge drawback to a photographer. Also, sadly, this is the only time the photographers name is graphically displayed; there’s no branded home-button or logo.

While Gitner separated the work into two, logical sections—multimedia and photography, the latter divided a second time into singles and stories—the gallery navigation could be reincarnated in a more intuitive manner. The current series of linked numbers along the top gray bar go unnoticed at first, and grow awkward through use. This is a likely candidate for conventional “previous” and “next” buttons.

One under-utilized element Gitner employed is using a load bar for each image link to signify that something is happening. This idea is so great that it alerted me to three broken links in the “Singles” gallery (1, 11 and 12). This is an easy fix.

While the singles gallery employs innovation, the multimedia gallery should take a cue. As it stands, each multimedia piece loads an external website in a new window, a risky decision that comes with additional load times and, potentially expired content and dead links. Ideally, multimedia pieces should play natively on the portfolio site with a link bank displayed in explanatory text.

Bottom line: Admirably, Gitner employs several unconventional features; some decisions pay off (load bars), others confuse (unconventional navigation). When designers take risks, conventions are born.