Open Source Creative

Approach to Portfolio Design

2006-12-03T22:40:00.000-08:00

Having developed a number of personal portfolios I have made my fair share of mistakes throughout the process of creating a website that best displays one's body of work. The process itself is simple, the difficult part was realising why it is so essential to approach portfolio design in the following way.

1. Identify your portfolio users

When applying for a job it is likely that your portfolio will first be viewed by human resources or someone who doesn't have design experience, they do however have experience navigating the web and they know a good portfolio from a bad one. Within large companies this filtering process is usually present, when applying to smaller firms your portfolio may be viewed by an art director, creative director, or even the principle of the company.

2. Develop your content first.

The major trap in portfolio design for is to starting working on the design of the site itself, let's face it, for a designer this is most fun, the natural thing to do is to start designing.

Instead of this write your content first, read some articles on copywriting for the web, create a structure for your information (heads, sub heads, paragraph lengths), refine this into a template that is flexible enough to adapt to all of the projects within your portfolio.

3. Asset creation

You'll have to revisit all of your old work, capture it, and resave it. On academic related projects, take the time to put some polish on them, likely your major constraint while working on the project was time, use this as an opportunity to better the piece and add to it with new/accumulated knowledge.

4. Sketchbook

You now have all of your assets, you have an idea of how many assets you'll need per portfolio piece based on the copy you have written. Begin sketching some layouts, make sure that the final selected layout will work with all of your portfolio pieces.

5. Starting thinking strategically about your homepage

How can this be tailored to specific job applications? What do you want visitors to see first? This layout should be different from the rest of the website. Homepage to subpages should transition seemlessly, navigation shouldn't jump around at all.

6. Take it digital

The rest is up to you as the designer, at this point you get to have fun, if you can get to this point without doing a single bit of work in photoshop you have conquered the mountain, take a breath of fresh air and let the design happen, let everything that has preceeded this inform every decision that you make digitally. This should greatly reduce the amount of time that it will take to complete your portfolio.

Personal Portfolio Redesign

2006-12-03T22:27:00.000-08:00

Upon purchasing some new pencils and a metal ruler I set out to complete a new portfolio redesign using an architectural/drafting approach to the creation of the grid/layout. This is just another attempt to do as much in a sketchbook as I possibly can before using a computer, using millimeters as pixels I completed the following design.

Developed further in photoshop to create the following working design.

I constantly preach about the importance of working in a sketchbook for as long as possible, delaying the urge to develop digitally to the point where you can't wait to make it Vector, add color, etc. I have found that in doing this, I am much more enthusiastic and creatively charged when taking the design into the digital world. At this point most of the thinking and major design decisions have been made, providing focused direction for the use of software.

Learning a Typeface

2006-12-03T22:02:00.000-08:00

In sketching a design or form I am able to reconstruct in a deconstructive manner, revealing underlying structure, sensitivity and process.

Eidetic Neo Regular drawn from Glyphs on a monitor

Link to font website

Sketched while reading The elements of typographical style

Logo Design Case Study - FVTN

2006-12-03T21:24:00.000-08:00

Gather client information.

- Research Existing Brand Materials (logo, website)

- Research Competitors, local design patterns (Fraser Valley), and industry equivalents in terms of size and success.

Hit the sketchbook

Stay in the sketch book as long as possible.

Entire page of sketching.

Take it digital

Where…

Many iterations are created by parallel processing multiple forms along a timeline

Eventually Resulting in a refined graphic

With typography added last, kerning adjusted for legibility, also contributing to the overall form and flow of the design.

About this blog

2006-11-02T09:47:00.000-08:00

"Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials—typically, their source code." - Wikipedia

The purpose of this blog is to make my creative process available to those who wish to practise or re-appropriate my approach to:

Illustration
Web Design
Identity Development
Print Design

The works created within these disciplines are defined by their code, the code being the creative process taken to bringing each piece to completion. This creative process is a product of working for 3 years within the design industry, during which I have developed my own process for completing a variety of tasks. This process was developed unconsciously and is largely a product of doing and learning, most importantly, learning from mistakes.

It is my intention to promote access to my creative process, it is my belief that others can push this process further and inform my own process. I am interested in the implications of doing this having witnessed the growth and innovation that open source model brought to the software industry.