Last Spring, Marco Ventura told me that he wanted to have his illustration portfolio on-line and asked me to design it. Marco lives in Milan but his reputation and clientele are international. I met him when I was assigning illustration for the Time magazine feature Spotlight. (Before I knew Marco, I was unfamiliar with Italians answering the phone “Pronto.”) He had digital files of all his work and sent them to me by email. I made my presentations to him using Skype.
Marco wanted a very minimal site with a white background and images that were not too large. Like many of the artists and photographers I have dealt with, he was concerned with… people downloading his work and using it without his permission. This is difficult because if you can view it, you can do a screen grab of it. By keeping his art relatively small, we limit the size it can be reused without pixelation.
I have done a number of portfolios and found a new javascript User Interface (UI) at Google Code that I wanted to use. I think it is quite successful and Marco is very pleased. See it at www.venturamarco.com. For the NEWS portion of his site, I added a blog. Marco seems tentative about blogging. I have worked with hundreds of illustrators and some can use the computer as just another tool, and some remain what I like to call “analog.” But my goal is to give my clients the capability of editing their sites. If they have/get the skillz.