8 - Organizing and Optimizing my Design Life

Once again my weekly readings brings me back to my portfolio. This week, designer Sara Eisenman discusses the essential steps to creating an organized and successful web portfolio. To learn more about this process please refer to Eisenman’s book, (pg 74 – 94). While Eisenman’s words were extremely helpful my attention was focus on the advice found in designer Building Design PortfoliosCynthia L. Baron’s, Designing a Digital Portfolio.

This week in Baron’s, Designing a Digital Portfolio, Baron discusses the tips towards collecting work and presenting it to you clients. Collecting work is a process, which I have been dreading. Unfortunately, as a design student, I have made the unfortunate and common mistake of saving my previous work in various different places on my computer. If I could offer advice to younger design students it would be to stay organized and be careful about saving your work. Although it seemed easy at the time to simply save something to my desktop, I know realize the faults of my laziness. After slowly weeding through the unorganized mess that is my files pace I was able to collect work, which I felt, was worthy of my portfolio. Unfortunately now I had another long process of refining and optimizing my work for my portfolio.

As you progress as a design student you learn new tricks and design principles and when you begin looking back at your older work you start to realize that there is a better way you could have approached this or maybe done this a different way. This is how I felt looking at many of my older pieces. I now saw details I missed or an area of a project I could have approached better. My design style had changed and because of this I now desired to change many of my old pieces. While refining your work is a good practice do not delete your older original piece. Your old artwork is reflective of yourself as a designer. Redesigning old work and then presenting it in comparison with your new design can show your progression as a designer and will allow a potential employee your though process, progression, and your desire to achieve better. Presenting old sketches of design will help as well.

So now you have your work, new designs, and old designs, what’s next? The next step to concern yourself about is presenting that work in your portfolio. When working with a web portfolio, which appears to be essential these days, one of your largest concerns is going to be optimizing your work for web. Web portfolios are great. They allow you to ha e your wonderful designs viewed by anyone with an internet connection, however what is lost with web portfolios is the quality of work; scanned items can lose textures and details, high quality images can lose resolution, etc. When designing your online portfolio allow time for yourself to go back and edit work to ensure the quality is preserved when viewing it online. Also when interviewing for your job, do not simply rely of a web portfolio. Print portfolio are always added bonuses for potential employer.

Interesting links I have come across this week:
SxSW Web Awards 2008
SXSW - Designer Portfolio Award Winner - JLern Design