It’s been a good month and a half since this portfolio launched and in that time my unabashed self-promotion has yielded a nice bit of support from various design sites across the net. I was also really excited to have a little Q&A written up about me on the creative community site Pelime — go and have a read and experience my cheesy portrait shot!
Chapter 2
I’ve been wanting to refresh my portfolio properly for months.
After toying with different ideas I settled on creating a ‘sequel’ to my final year university portfolio, as its themes encompassed everything I enjoy the most and I wanted a serious writing challenge.
I sat down and started creating this portfolio on Christmas Eve last year. After many disjointed weekends and late nights, feverishly writing and frantically dusting off my CSS knowledge, I’m finally ready and proud to launch it today. It’s definitely a labour of love and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
In the weeks to come I’ll write a nice making-of (mainly for my own record and as a ceremonious brain dump) and gradually release some other little bits and bobs I’ve got planned — in amongst new bits of work being added, of course.
Enjoy!
This was a campaign idea for Matalan — a homage to the Eternal Moonwalk. The Eternal Catwalk is a never-ending platform for customers to celebrate their wardrobe.
Another portfolio cull. This was a concept redesign for the McArthurGlen Designer Outlets — the aim was to create a more aspiring and enticing visually-led site. The header and footer frame, like letterboxes, the filmic scene in the centre. Very much liked this at the time but the typography’s looking very weak now.
On the first day of Christmas…
We’ve had quite a few Christmas related ideas at Code the past few months. One I envisioned (and which we were going to run with until we collectively realised it would take far too much time and manpower to do successfully) was a ‘Twelve Days of Code’. Each day we’d present a unique video, microsite, app, game or whatever that gave a look into the life, culture or people of Code. We genuinely had something great and interesting for each day but alas time and common sense was against us.
My idea was sparked by my line “On the first day of Christmas Code Computerlove gave to me…” — I aimed to rewrite the Twelve Days of Christmas song, syllable for syllable, reflecting each of the twelve ‘presents’ we were going to give. Housed in a microsite, its layout and structure would reflect the recursive nature of the song — so you could effectively sing it and browse the website at the same time.
Third — Refuge. I wrote about this way back here actually, and then I eventually mocked it up visually. I still quite like it.
Secondly, Sunkist. This was a very quick brief and I helped with ideas, some design, and I did the copywriting.
The first casualty of my portfolio cull is Beaverbrooks. I really enjoyed creating this at the time. I tried to gently introduce tactile visual elements to reflect the very ‘hands-on’ process of choosing jewellery pieces.
Despite my incredible lack of writing on here I have been very busy. Got lots of shiny new work to show off but I’m holding back until I’ve created my new portfolio. Granted, I’ve actually yet to start that — I’m going to reward myself with its creation once I’ve done a bit of animation (I’m getting into After Effects and I’m quite surprised to say I love it).
My current portfolio’s in need of a trim as some of my work from last year is beginning to show its less flattering side — I’m moving some bits here so this blog can act as a little journey through my career, hopefully showing my progression as a designer and writer.
My thoughts on Twitter
I tried using Twitter while at University but found it fruitless (I didn’t know who to follow, and barely any of my friends could be bothered using it), and it was only since working full-time, surrounded by friends/co-workers who actively used the site that I was encouraged and inspired to follow suit.
Make of it what you will: Despite my incessant tweeting of whatever I find interesting or inspiring (largely design-related), I mainly use the service just to see what people at work are up to and to share in-jokes and amusing quips with said people. However it’s of course a very useful and efficient tool to discover news and products related to the industry, if you’re following even just a select number of people that share your interests.
Cull, cull and cull some more: Don’t be afraid to unfollow people if you don’t find their tweets particularly interesting or useful, else you’ll find Twitter to be an unwieldy, time-consuming beast of spam, self-congratulating and inane musings (and that’s just my profile) — that’s from my experience at least. And I’ve never seen the attraction in mass-following people in the vein hope that they’ll return the favour, it seems bizarre and impersonal.
A completist’s nightmare: I’m sure I’m not in the minority here, but I’m compelled to read every single tweet from everyone I follow. The list of people I follow is trim, so this is easily manageable, but it’s as though I’m reading an eternal novel and I naturally need to read everything chronologically — so I’m checking Twitter constantly to almost see ‘what comes next’. Maybe I’m just strange?
Spoiler: This was written as part of an upcoming article on the Code Blog.
