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“The Worst Portfolio Ever.”

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I’ve been poking through portfolio examples lately, in a half-hearted effort to get my own design interests going in any direction aside from nowhere.

Back in February, I took an hour or so and plugged through a collection of 40 brilliant portfolio sites, as curated by Creative Bloq here.

The first page of works definitely caught my attention and gave my heart a flutter of panic: I am a Hack. I have no Body of Work. I’ve been designing stuff on the fly for the same company for 3 years, on top of my regular job as development director. WTF do I even put in a portfolio?? What skills do I have to showcase?

Ignoring the panic, I continued on through the next 3 pages. The editor(s) may have lost some steam in their project as they added to their list of 40. I felt better as I got to the end, felt that I could connect better with what the artists and designers were presenting and how they displayed it on the inter webs.

[Then came Wisdom Teeth surgery and Vacation.]IMG_4611

It’s been a couple months since I’ve focused on my own projects. I picked up another freelance/consultant-ish job in non-profit development, the very field I thought I didn’t want to be in anymore. My creative exploration went stagnant.

Not sure what happened today, perhaps it was desperate procrastination, but I stumbled back into some of my bookmarks as I left them in February. Remembered I had signed up for a Cargo Collective account. Started poking through portfolios and adding designers I liked to Twitter (where I have nothing to say and just stalk people doing cool things).  And through this meandering, I stumbled on Alex Cornell.

What REALLY got me was this article and accompanying demonstration.

Then I fired up TYF while also going back to look at that list of 40 brilliant what-nots from above. What got me laughing is I have CLEAR recollections of going through those sites and seeing some of these very elements in sites that were meant to inspire! I realized too that much of what Cornell is suggesting to NOT do are things that I despised about portfolios, and what was my own stumbling block to getting mine done or started or somewhere in between.

Writing about myself. Explaining what I do. What my background is. ETC.

He made a point. Show what you do. Drop the narratives.

I just got to actually do something.
That’s about 95% of the struggle and what defines you as an artist of whatever genre you work within. I’ve been skating so long on having been good at something in high school, not just with art but with music or singing or sports. I need to practice, I need to be doing.

Why is it so hard? What else is holding me back?

 

 

Fighting back against self doubt.

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I’m 29 years old. I’ve got 2 degrees that at first glance are not related to anything usually considered artistic or creative. (BA in Poli Sci and an MPA in Int’l Development and Public Service, if it matters.)

What those degrees mean is that I am good at people, identifying and predicting social behaviors, and using that knowledge to design programs to improve and work towards a positive goal. So in one sense, I’ve been a designer for a long time, but not in a way that I even understood until very recently. I’m no stranger to writing intensive, intellectual works -whether it be grad papers or grant applications- for public critique and consideration, but I felt more informed and qualified to do it in those specific arenas where I was more familiar with the expected protocols for how to do so.

When it came to applying the same approach to my more ‘creative’ endeavors, I clammed up, shied away. Over time, it got worse. As did my anxiety at facing strong criticism about those things, because I felt like an amateur, a fraud, a fake. To some extent, those feelings are valid. There are many artists out there who have invested a lot of time, money, and energy into their passions. Occasionally busting out a doodle on the back of a meeting agenda does not make me an artist. I’ve been skating by on the drawing skills I picked up in high school and haven’t truly cultivated them since.

This year, and by that I really mean the past 2-3 months, I’ve been going through a personal metamorphosis to reconcile this inner dispute. I stepped down from an awesome job that I’ve had for 4 years (one that was actually fairly creative, but the nature of my work was less so than I liked). I’ve pushed myself to take more risks in couple different ways: investing in books and resources that I had put off because it wasn’t immediately relevant to my life at the moment and was expensive; accepting that I am, and may always be, in the middle of a learning process so perfection is not possible; understanding that creation is not just about the final product, it’s about the time commitment and dedication to learning how to be able to do that over and over again, gaining mastery of a craft; and the most difficult, letting go of my apprehension to be myself in public forums, whether digital or physical. It’s ok to be wrong, it’s ok to have created something that wasn’t great, so long as I am open to learn from it.

There has been a great imbalance between what I consume and what I contribute. I watch amazing films, tv shows, cartoons, anime, read graphic novels, internet comics, and listen to all sorts of music and comedy, yet I rarely share anything that I make. All of those things that I’ve experienced have shaped who I am and how I think. This is my year to correct that disparity and put stuff back out there that represents my own imaginary world views.

I’m still figuring out what my own creative process is, and narrowing in on what exactly I want to do, but just having let my guard down enough to put something in a public space again feels amazing.