Portfolios, how do they work?
November 1, 2016 5:52 AM Subscribe
In search of a radical career change, I need an online portfolio to pursue creative technology. My stuff is all over the place. How to get it more coherent?
As my industry has gone away from here, I'm going to have to change careers. Some of my creative technology and design work has attracted attention, and I want to have a place that can showcase this.
My blog is an abject miscellany, and my website main design has some CSS2 that was pretty darn stylin' back when it was written in February 2003. There are YouTube videos, lasercut doodads, tutorials, patterns, fonts, deliberately futile electronic devices … if there's a theme, it has eluded me all these years.
What I'm really asking (I think) is how does one showcase one's work? How does one even begin to curate what is out there? Some of the stuff I consider utterly disposable gets good responses, and other work I'm intensely proud of sinks like a stone, so clearly I'm not the best judge of what to present.
As my industry has gone away from here, I'm going to have to change careers. Some of my creative technology and design work has attracted attention, and I want to have a place that can showcase this.
My blog is an abject miscellany, and my website main design has some CSS2 that was pretty darn stylin' back when it was written in February 2003. There are YouTube videos, lasercut doodads, tutorials, patterns, fonts, deliberately futile electronic devices … if there's a theme, it has eluded me all these years.
What I'm really asking (I think) is how does one showcase one's work? How does one even begin to curate what is out there? Some of the stuff I consider utterly disposable gets good responses, and other work I'm intensely proud of sinks like a stone, so clearly I'm not the best judge of what to present.
I'm in the same boat (trying to create a portfolio out of a whole bunch of different kinds of projects - talks, writing, events, videos) and what I've got so far is a bunch of possible Wordpress portfolios that would allow people to search per category.
The combination of things that looked most promising was the Portfolio Toolkit plugin in combination with a simple theme like this one for example. (These are the two things I will be trying for mine once I have some free time.)
For reference, my "portfolio site" is currently divided into three sections and a gallery within each of them, but this doesn't show up very well in Google search results, and I'm not happy with having to pigeonhole all projects into one of three boxes, so I need to change the whole system.
posted by easternblot at 7:39 AM on November 1, 2016
The combination of things that looked most promising was the Portfolio Toolkit plugin in combination with a simple theme like this one for example. (These are the two things I will be trying for mine once I have some free time.)
For reference, my "portfolio site" is currently divided into three sections and a gallery within each of them, but this doesn't show up very well in Google search results, and I'm not happy with having to pigeonhole all projects into one of three boxes, so I need to change the whole system.
posted by easternblot at 7:39 AM on November 1, 2016
I've always liked this site and the work shared in it.
posted by maudlin at 10:53 AM on November 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by maudlin at 10:53 AM on November 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: Thanks! I ended up just picking out all the content I liked best from my blog, and making a page of it in Wordpress with pictures under thematic headings. It has picked up positive comments.
(heh - maudlin's link is to a friend of mine's portfolio; small world)
posted by scruss at 11:51 AM on December 14, 2016
(heh - maudlin's link is to a friend of mine's portfolio; small world)
posted by scruss at 11:51 AM on December 14, 2016
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by edbles at 7:00 AM on November 1, 2016 [1 favorite]