Student Portfolio Workshop

The opportunity to talk about your work is like falling in love all over again.

This past week I've been having so much trouble figuring out how to lay out my portfolio. I guess it's not surprising, but after going through this process I realized something. Maybe somewhere along the way I lost sight of what's really important.

The act of talking about your body of work requires you to look within and pull out those memories. Often times the things you choose to articulate in these situations are the distilled sum of those projects. In other words, what matters most. Having fresh eyes and ears summarize and reinterpret those experiences, well, what's left is who you are as a designer and what you want to become.

It's so easy to get stuck in your own head. What was reiterated to me this Saturday was that my design is about people, interaction, and ideas. Since I've been having so much trouble laying out my work I've been going to the inter-webs for inspiration. A lot of the portfolios I found were from a particular school that often focuses on aesthetics. These portfolios were really nice and maybe because they seemed aesthetically beautiful, whatever that means, I almost took it as the truth or the way a portfolio should be.

I ended up in this circle of maybe if I put this folio here or move this over 5 pixels it'll make everything better, but of course it didn't. One of my reviewers mentioned that the way I talk about my work is very different from how I show it. His exact word were "it seems clinical," I believe. Anyways the moral of this story is that your portfolio is a reflection of your work and a projection of who you want to become so don't make it anything it's not.

I guess I just needed to be reminded of that.