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.]
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?
