AAD II, Assignment 1, Post 1- Portfolio, but online!

 The one things I decided on with little analysis when this assignment was explained was I would use my Dulse Sheep Design branding from AAD I.  I really liked what I had produced for that assignment and hope to make it going concern at some level.  Details to be determined.

I did a small update to my Behance profile at Christmas and was singularly uninspired by the experience, so even before Ian said that Behance shouldn't be used I had decided to switch.  But to what?  There were a lot of tools flying around, Canva, Wix, Wordpress, etc.  With the exception of Canva they all seemed pretty CSS, or site specific process, heavy.  I used Canva during the marketing course and it seemed like glorified powerpoint so that was out.

I went to the source of all knowledge, Google, and searched for 'good portfolio site builder'.  Lots of returns, but the /r/portfolio subreddit threw up some interesting results.  There was a lot of illustrative, anime focused portfolios that used Carrd.  While I might make the subject matter, they were simple, bright, and I thought they would work well with DSD's palette of bright colours.

Some examples: https://benesumi.com/

https://dotsu.carrd.co/#

I also liked https://www.bryanbaltz.com/ but that was made with Squarespace, a mainly commerce platform, something I don't need right now.  He is also on Dribble, a site that I had heard about in my research.  It's interesting and seems to be a curated venue for designers and illustrators.  It seems to have a bit of a start up vibe and I did not actually see how curated it was as I was skittish due to the vagueness of the information provided on a very slick website.

I was to later find that the Carrd ones I looked at had selected a higher tier and had more features that my tier, but by then I was well into it so stuck with it.

So, Carrd. $9/year for three pages.  Seems ok.  What I didn't understand was that was three separate URLs, not a single website with three subdomains.  It took some further research to find out it was a single, long page with sections.  Now the black lines in my starting page made sense.

So, medium length process to learn how to use Carrd summarized as:

• Make containers
• Put elements in the containers
• Format elements
• Publish website

Pretty straight forward, limited formatting at my price point, just some specific codes like ||blank to make Instagram open on a separate page.  Putting the page together was pretty straightforward.  I embraced the one page idea, put in lots of ways to get back to the top.  I would have liked to be able to include a floating menu along the side to be able to jump to sections, but no such luck (see CSS comment below).

The part that took some thought was what to put on the page.  I decided I needed:

• My name
• Contact information
• Examples of work
• CV
• Some personal messaging to make people welcome

Name, contact, messaging was straightforward.  I updated my CV from the portfolio development, reformatted it, and went with that.  Getting those outlined, and bing, bang, boom I've got a website:

https://dulsesheep.carrd.co/

The examples of work took the most time to decide what to include.  I decided to break them down into my four favourite genres; having four also made a nice grid.  Not a perfect grid due to the fairly coarse controls Carrd natively provides, just sliders.  I did have to combine digital motion and design items.  Carrd allows for galleries of pictures, but not videos so I put that as the last section as the formatting was different.  I believe CSS might have allowed that, but I didn't have access to CSS.

Here's a shot of what the native Carrd formating is, for the container and an element.  This explains some of the lack of line extensions (sorry).

 

Selection of works was based on items I found were particularly good and/or unique.  I also tried to  find ones where I had snapped some in progress shots.  I captioned the works with name, date, and materials, and where in the process the photo was take.  This was a compromise between the many fine art portfolios that only show the work and a title, and the portfolios with full on, step-by-step descriptions of the process.  I do like showing what I did, but I'm not all interested documenting my whole process for a potential employer.  What I have done shows that the work is my own; I am quite willing to discuss my work with anyone that inquires, whether they are potential clients, employers, or just interested.

Overall this assignment was both interesting and useful.  I got to review my work and bring up some fond memories and remembrances of how to do things for my grad projects.  I also got to see how DSD could be brought to life and be a viable engine for my work.  I did also realize that I have to do more game related work.  Also, not needing to work makes looking for work very liberating.

Two spaces for life!