In my interactive media class, we are working on a website for our electronic portfolios. Mine is a work in progress at www.tutorialistic.com. Feedback/suggestions welcome.

In the process of developing our sites, the professor gave us two very interesting links... one with examples of inspiring portfolios, and one with not-so-great portfolios.

I really enjoyed these links, especially seeing the good portfolios. In many of them not only was the layout great, but the design work was amazing.

It also talks about the use of small thumbnails as a way of showing work, and why it isn't always the best thing to do. It mentions that when you use thumbnails that show only a small portion of your work, it doesn't really give you any motivation to click on one or the other. As thumbnails many times being part of the design of the website, I believe it may be better to make them bigger so that they show more of the work's uniqueness before the user even clicks on them for full version. Anyway, it has much more information about it on the link.

THE LINKS:


http://astheria.com/design/portfolios-that-accomplishgoals - portfolios that accomplish goals

http://astheria.com/design/my-last-portfolio-sucked-yours-might-too - portfolios that kinda suck

More Work

While I was at school, I thought I'd post another one of the pieces that I've done and that also went into my Sophomore Portfolio Review. It is another assignment from one of my classes. It's a jazz poster for the Annual PDX Jazz Fest (but it had nothing to do with the actual event). It was an assignment that was originally worked on by three of us, which I then took and customized to my own liking for submitting for the portfolio review.

Original size was 16" x 22".

Some of my work

Thought I'd provide images for some of my work I've done so far. Most of these have been done in school classes - all aimed toward achieving a certain design goal.
This first design was created using only the letters "g" and "d." The grid in the middle was incorporated because it was part of the instruction for the assignment. We had to come up with a grid that resonated and worked well, considering the colors and the letters "g" and "d"; including how they were arranged, what colors they were going to be, and so on.

This second image was created actually on my own outside of class. It's a design incorporating a quote from the Tao te Ching, one of my favorite books. I currently am using it as a design for my online store at cafepress. (www.cafepress.com/observed)









This third image is a pepsi label I design for the Pepsi Can contest. Whoever won of course got their design on pepsi cans all over the place and won a bunch of money. Unfortunately I didn't win. :( But I still like the design.





This fourth image was a class assignment. The goal was to create a catalog cover for Portland State's 2009 Summer Session classes. The final version is slightly different - the "e" in summer is moved to the left a bit, and the small print in the lower left is spaced better. I'll have to find the final version later. Anyway, we had to use type in an interesting way for our catalog cover.









This fifth image was also a school assignment. The objective was to create a cover for a technical design graphics manual. We had to find technical graphics and create unique illustrations from them. So I found some technical graphics, took them into illustrator and re-drew parts of them and put the parts together to create my own unique illustration.


More to come later!