Designing My Own Website and Business Cards
- sveahartle
- Feb 14, 2020
- 10 min read
As I’ve blogged about in my last blog entry “From Camera Assistance to Director of Photography: My Plan for Employment”, I’ve decided that – in order to become a fully-fledged Director of Photography one day – I will start out my career by offering my services as a freelance camera assistant so that I would not only be able to pay for my own income, but also to learn more about the craft itself.
So in order to promote myself in this particular function, I’ve devised a list of items as well as a plan/schedule in order to organise my promotion and myself and to set myself up for employment within the industry. The list of items – just for a quick recap – thus ran as follows:
The Top 50 Company List
Professional headshots
An updated CV
A professional bio write-up
A professional website
Business cards
Professional social media accounts (FB, Instagram, and Twitter)
A Youtube and Vimeo account
Media Job Search accounts (such as Xing and Linked-In)
A showreel, and lastly:
A film poster for my FMP
So in order to start ticking that list off, I’ve decided to start with my website, and thus settle the overall setup, design, and colour palette. Since promoting oneself has a lot to do with portraying an image – images usually say more than one thousand words ever will – it is furthermore important that the projected image is unified in its message and design.
Furthermore, and most importantly in my mind, this particular image also needs to be easy to read and even easier to remember. This especially holds true in an industry that is based on visuals and coherent messages.
Why a Webpage?
It might seem like a superfluous question in this day and age, however, I felt that this topic needed addressing just for completion’s sake.
Ever since the rise of the Internet, and its own diversification, niche marketing, and unique medial properties, an online presence has become increasingly important. With the Internet, the way we obtain information has fundamentally changed from the printed word in a lexicon to the digitally submitted word online. As such, if we want to retrieve information, we nowadays usually venture online for obtainment and verification and as such, we also look for other’s recommendations and thoughts about any particular goods, piece of information, etc.
This has also held true not only for goods, but also for services, and subsequently, companies and their reputation. So one vital means of ascertaining whether any prospective employee, employer, service/goods provider etc. is legitimate, we first and foremost venture online to see whether they have a reputable online presence. If we fail to obtain sufficient information – or any information at all – we are less likely to positively respond to whatever we are seeking; especially if the cause of our research centres on financial or personal investments.
Finding the person or company we seek online automatically gives more of an authority and legitimacy to them, making it more likely that we will engage. And since I’ve always kept myself rather covered with my online presence (and only about now starting out on a professional level), I’ve decided that setting up my own webpage will be a good first step to take.
Since this will not only be evidence to demonstrate that I am truly existent in the age of the Internet, but also be the first address to showcase my work, it truly cannot hurt to own a webpage.
My Research – Webpage Setup and Design Ideas
As such, and in order to set up my own professional website without making common and thus avoidable mistakes, I decided to conduct some research into professional websites of production companies, DoPs, and camera assistants to find a good common middle ground and find the design that best suits my objectives.
Thus, I started out by researching the company webpage of my boss to see how he set his one up:
From this setup, it was obvious that he selected a simpler scroll-down webpage that has everything important – such as a webpage teaser, general summary of the company, latest works, an about us segment, endorsements, and Instagram photos – neatly displayed on the front page, whilst offering additional information – a more extensive portfolio and contact details – on two further pages.
My boss further opted for a darker design that enhances the brilliancy of his images while at the same time shifting the focus to said images. The font however is bold and easy to read, making information easily accessible.
I then ventured further and looked at some other webpages just for reference – one of them being the webpage of current Doctor Who DoP Catherine Goldschmidt:
This setup was slightly differently, as she focussed more on imagery of her latest works in order to capture her potential new customer’s attention on the front page and instead directing them to her respective work specialisms on the top with pages dedicated to narrative, documentary, and commercials, before then offering an About page.
In contrast to the webpage design for Digitalfire, Catherine Goldschmidt instead embraced the colour white and used a sleek font for her webpage.
I then finally ventured online to look closer to home and see how some freelance camera assistants have set their webpages up. However, this part of the research was a bit more problematic as there was not that many out there to source from. Whilst a lot of camera assistants are offering their services online, only very few of them have their own dedicated webpage. Instead, most of them retreated to just having a profile on a media job website.
Since this was not what I envisioned for myself, I instead picked one for reference from this camera assistant called Liam Meredith.
Here again, the darker colours and simpler design took dominance. However, compared to the previous two websites, he instead decided on distributing his information to different pages on his webpage, thus resulting in tab registers dedicated to his About page, credits, photos, contact details, and other work.
The Application of My Research
Having looked at the different setups that I could possibly choose for my web presence, I found myself liking the rather dark designs with simpler setups. Since I have a preference for sleek designs, fonts and clarity, and since I prefer darker colours as contrast points to colourful imagery, I felt that with my own design, I would be closer to the setup that my boss currently has.
As such, I set about duplicating my previous student webpage and start recreating a darker style professional webpage of my own with a streamlined setup.
As such, the homepage for my webpage is currently featuring the following segments in that particular order:
A cover image with my name and my job title
A segment for my show reel to come
A photo section of myself at work
An inspirational quote
The link to my blog
A contact form
Further links to my Instagram, Twitter, etc.
Furthermore, since I do have a strong personal preference for music videos, Sci-Fi, and commercials, I felt that a simplistic design with darker colours might fit that purpose a lot better. In order to not come up with too dark a design, I thus settled on an accent colour to break up the design and make it easier on the eyes while at the same time remaining darker and genre-specific. Thus, I finally settled on the colour petrol.
A Disclaimer on Data Collection
Whilst it is rightfully argued that data collection offers access to a variety of avenues for profit as well as information, spawning entire business models centred on the collection and retrieval of data, there is a massive downside to it, which I would like to address in the following.
Whilst it might seem profitable for some business models to obtain data, making it seem like its goods that are ripe for picking and easy to obtain, this holds only true in certain regards.
Looking at the model of Funnel marketing, for example, it generally features the idea that – as long as you offer some free information, good, solution, or service in exchange – you would be able to obtain data such as names, email addresses, phone numbers and the like.
Anyone who would want access to that information – say a free recipe for a cheesecake online – would be able to obtain that information just in exchange for the data mentioned above. Just install a subscription page or automated pop-up and take it from there.
Or so is the thought.
Whilst this might hold true for older generations who did not grow up with the Internet as much as I do, and thus have not learned about the importance and exploitability of their data in the wider scheme of things, it is most certainly not the same for many in my generation.
Already my generation learned in school that you should not easily give away any sensitive information about yourself, especially not online. Whilst it might seem anonymous to you sitting in front of the computer screen, giving away your data will most certainly not be. And although there are goods and services that require you to give away some of your data – like your health care provider, your university’s online learning platform, or big online store magnates that shall remain unnamed here – my generation has always been advised to be utterly careful with whom you share your personal information.
As such, business schemes like the above-mentioned model, especially the type that offers you some information seemingly for free in return, have been marked out as a major red flag already back in my day. Instead of giving away data like that, we’ve been advised to increase our effort in researching to allow us to obtain that information for less of a price. And apart from very few exceptions in my life, I’ve usually been able to obtain what I needed without giving away personal information that is then sold away to some third party at ultimately my expense.
As such, I become extremely weary of websites, services, and individuals who practice this kind of data collection. Usually, whenever I find myself being asked to sign up for anything in exchange, I will categorically turn around and leave that particular provider. Unless I am forced to engage with them due to the level of importance, external circumstances, or their monopoly position in providing a certain goods/service, I will not provide my own information at all.
There is enough diversity and competition on the Internet to find alternative solutions for most of the issues of daily life, and there is, after all, a reason why the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Policy has been such a massive topic within the EU and for all their servers residing within. As such, I find it ethically problematic to offer seemingly free information in exchange for data collection, and I will not pursue this kind of avenue for my own employment or (future) company.
Furthermore, and if studying filmmaking in the past three years has taught me anything, it’s that these offered “free” solutions and tutorials – especially for the type of industry I want to enter – rarely work for the laymen unless they put in a lot of time, money, effort, and equipment themselves. And by that time, it’s easier for them to hire the person who has obtained the skills already.
As such, I don’t feel that I will miss out on any revenue in that regard. If anything, I will be able to make more business with people who are conscious about issues like these; which is my generation and younger.
Complementing the Webpage – My Business Card Designs
Having written about my webpage in extension, I will now proceed onto another item of the list that is equally as important: My own business cards.
For this, I hereby need to make a disclaimer though: Since I am currently looking at the very likely prospect of being hired as a camera assistant for Digitalfire, this part of my promotion is currently only at the design stage. As I will be employed with Digitalfire and – if taken on-board permanently – get my own company’s business card in the future, I currently don’t see the need for ordering physical copies of my business card as of now.
However, that still does not keep me from designing them. Which is why I once more ventured online and looked for an online print service to provide me with that item from my checklist.
As such, I used the German version of Vistaprint as a design resource. I’ve already used their services in the past when I designed my own business cards for my work as a translator and they’ve always provided me with good service. So I figured I’d give them a shot to see what they come up with.
Thus, and using their automated design software, I started out by selecting a design and changing it to my own preferences. So at first, I selected a standard square design on thick paper, using the dark colour palette that I already applied for my webpage, providing me with this first sample.
Whilst I liked the initial design and especially the format, I felt that I needed to play around a bit more with the fonts, which led me to a series of font combinations to choose from. At the same time though, the format which I liked so much was temporarily discontinued, which is why I had to swap to a design with rounded corners in order to be able to use their design tool. As such, here are further intermediate results:
Not being able to settle on a certain font (combination) just yet, I then decided to postpone that particular decision and instead play around with some more colours to see whether I would like them better:
However, looking back at all the designs that I’ve created, I realised that these were a bit too strong for my taste and that I still liked my intial colour palette the most. So I stuck with it, thus leaving me only to settle on a font design. After a bit more contemplation in the previous days, I thus finally settled on this design, which I felt was sleek and futuristic enough to suggest the genre styles I want to go for, whilst at the same time being open for any other design:
Having accomplished these tasks, the only items currently missing for my webpage are an updated version of a page dedicated to my work, a usable headshot, and a show reel to be linked to my webpage.
Enough left to do then!
References:
Vistaprint. (2020) Homepage. [online] Available at: https://www.vistaprint.de/vp/welcomeback.aspx?xnav=welcome&rd=1 [Accessed on 13 February 2020].
Digitalfire. (2019) Homepage. [online] Available at: https://digitalfire.co.uk [Accessed on 13 February 2020].
Catherine Goldschmidt. (n.d.) Homepage. [online] Available at: http://catherinegoldschmidt.com [Accessed on 13 February 2020].
Liam Meredith Freelance Camera Assistant. (n.d.) Homepage. [online] Available at: http://www.liammeredith.co.uk [Accessed on 13 February 2020].
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