How To Create A Web Portfolio
Jul. 7th, 2008 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nemorathwaldI just lost a temp assignment paying a very good rate to design websites, because I couldn't think of any URLs to send them to. An hour ago everyone was excited and it looked like I had it in the bag. The agent just called to ask for samples, and I choked in obvious shame and embarrassment about how I have no online professional experience to show.
My work for Valenite is locked up behind passwords. I don't want employers going to my personal site, because it's the kind of content that should not have any bearing on the workplace. There's still Kirk In The Hills, but I did that years ago. Penguicon 6.0 is still online from last year, but was not paying work, and was basically just a masthead and some color choices. Plus there's some weird "Local pop get this player" glitch going on in the upper-left corner recently that I don't understand.
A portfolio of websites, by nature, would be looked at without me present to explain, by a stranger who knows nothing of me or the context of the work. Not all design is equivalent for these purposes; how do I know which site is relevant to send them to, before I know which kinds of design challenges they want to consider me for? When I send someone to look at a site, how do I know which part of the work are they going to judge? How do they know what I contributed to the site? For my personal site, I took somebody's Wordpress template and personalized it. Kirk In The Hills hired a hosting company that provided content management coding services, and just asked me to decide how it looked. Penguicon 6.0 is the standard blog outline. All my work for Valenite was adding content to an existing site that was already designed.
What would a portfolio of web sites be like? The concept seems counter-intuitive. A web site is its own entity with its own purpose outside a portfolio. It lives and breathes and changes for its purpose, out of the designer's control. A site that only shows off "design", devoid of content or audience, would show off... what? What is design without content to design around and a specific audience to design for? An empty frame to hang on the wall, meant for strangers. Certainly not something that I know how to do, or even begin.
When I design, I please a particular audience, because I know something about them. That audience is the group of people who will have to look at the thing and use it. Unfortunately, in an employment context, this is not the same group who are paying for it. With a portfolio, I would have to design for people who are only looking at it because they are paid to look at it. Not because they want to find out about the topic of the website. I don't know how to help them find information they don't actually want. Can you tell how frustrated I feel about this?
I have many sites in the works, on paper prototypes. Me andle_bebna_kamni have been on a paper prototyping binge of late. A Massively Multi-Author Webcomic. A Lojban combat quest game. A concept I call "FOMS", for user input on convention scheduling. I think what I'll do is start a YouTube video series showing the paper prototypes and how these web apps would function if anyone coded them. I suppose that in order to get professional web work, I'll have to have a set of web sites that exist completely within my control, for which I am solely responsible. For someone who likes to collaborate, that's frustrating.
My work for Valenite is locked up behind passwords. I don't want employers going to my personal site, because it's the kind of content that should not have any bearing on the workplace. There's still Kirk In The Hills, but I did that years ago. Penguicon 6.0 is still online from last year, but was not paying work, and was basically just a masthead and some color choices. Plus there's some weird "Local pop get this player" glitch going on in the upper-left corner recently that I don't understand.
A portfolio of websites, by nature, would be looked at without me present to explain, by a stranger who knows nothing of me or the context of the work. Not all design is equivalent for these purposes; how do I know which site is relevant to send them to, before I know which kinds of design challenges they want to consider me for? When I send someone to look at a site, how do I know which part of the work are they going to judge? How do they know what I contributed to the site? For my personal site, I took somebody's Wordpress template and personalized it. Kirk In The Hills hired a hosting company that provided content management coding services, and just asked me to decide how it looked. Penguicon 6.0 is the standard blog outline. All my work for Valenite was adding content to an existing site that was already designed.
What would a portfolio of web sites be like? The concept seems counter-intuitive. A web site is its own entity with its own purpose outside a portfolio. It lives and breathes and changes for its purpose, out of the designer's control. A site that only shows off "design", devoid of content or audience, would show off... what? What is design without content to design around and a specific audience to design for? An empty frame to hang on the wall, meant for strangers. Certainly not something that I know how to do, or even begin.
When I design, I please a particular audience, because I know something about them. That audience is the group of people who will have to look at the thing and use it. Unfortunately, in an employment context, this is not the same group who are paying for it. With a portfolio, I would have to design for people who are only looking at it because they are paid to look at it. Not because they want to find out about the topic of the website. I don't know how to help them find information they don't actually want. Can you tell how frustrated I feel about this?
I have many sites in the works, on paper prototypes. Me and
le_bebna_kamni have been on a paper prototyping binge of late. A Massively Multi-Author Webcomic. A Lojban combat quest game. A concept I call "FOMS", for user input on convention scheduling. I think what I'll do is start a YouTube video series showing the paper prototypes and how these web apps would function if anyone coded them. I suppose that in order to get professional web work, I'll have to have a set of web sites that exist completely within my control, for which I am solely responsible. For someone who likes to collaborate, that's frustrating.
