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The importance of a (live) Portfolio


During my first visit at Bate Brand’s studio I encountered a situation that made me feel quite nervous initially. After summarizing the idea of doing work experience, I was asked by Mr. Bate to show the team a representation of my work.
I assumed that Mr. Bate wanted to see a live portfolio with excerpts that I have created – a necessity for any designer that works with web technologies and graphics. For the time being I did not have a portfolio that was available online. I had researched hosting options but did not go any further than that. This made me feel quite insecure and I felt almost ashamed that I had not proceeded with the task before.
 I explained to Mr. Bate that at the present time I was not able to showcase my previous work in a remotely accessed format. I also mentioned that I had looked into domain availability and pricing plans and explained that at the time I could not afford them. However, I remembered that when approaching Bate Brand for a first time by an email, I attached some images that represented my work to an extent. I suggested to Mr. Bate that If this is an option he agrees with, I can get to the visuals that I had sent and go through each one of them by justifying my decisions of choosing the design, coding solution and overall intention.

Mr. Bate gave me his permission which is where I stepped in and did a little presentation of my work. The first item I talked about was a mockup for my Portfolio – I explained the choice of fonts, positioning the menu, arranging a gallery with images of my projects and dynamic navigation at the top. The aim of that was to show Mr. Bate that I was intending to proceed with the task of making an online Portfolio and had made some plans about its presentation. I also explained that I was going to use Adobe Muse as a building platform which supports parallax scrolling, full screen gallery and interactive menus.
Mr. Bate seemed pleased with my overview and I continued discussing my other projects. One of them was a website called “The Chocolate Factory”. I emphasized on the choice of a colour palette which consisted of dark brown shades that represent chocolate. I also mentioned the use of Javascript which is used to add shopping functionality to the website as well as importing dynamic text that sends a greeting message to the user depending on what time of the day and week they are viewing the website.

The lesson behind this experience taught me that when feeling insecure, it is a better approach to engage with the other side and create an opportunity for showing my strengths with appropriate reasoning. I also realized the importance of having an online portfolio – a crucial element of my progress as a designer that needs a platform to showcase their work to the world.

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