There seems to be a strange obsession at the moment amongst designers with cramming as many social networking doo-dads onto their portfolio site as possible. I’ve always found it a strange marketing strategy to use a portfolio for bombarding potential employers with every aspect of your social life. Personally, I feel it is more prudent to hold back a bit on the plug-ins and feeds. Do you really think your latest Twitter post will reflect favourably on you as a professional? Do you honestly expect someone to hire you based on your top 10 Last.fm tracks?
In putting together the blog section of this site I made a lot of decisions as to how it would be used, who would be reading it, and how it tied in with the rest of the website. I too was tempted by the shiny plug-ins and widgets, but ultimately I decided they were just unnecessary. I even disabled standard Wordpress features like comments (though that was more through a fear that I’d get spammed or worse – get no comments whatsoever!).
I can of course understand why people choose to display all of these seemingly extraneous details alongside their work, many employers like to see that someone is not just a machine for churning out work, and does actually have other interests. At the end of the day though, I think it takes all the fun out of having a web presence if you know that every tweet, every Facebook status update could in some way affect your employability in the future. That, and the fact that somebody could find out about my crack addiction.
Ok so here’s what this blog will be for: Updates on work, snippets of projects I’m working on, useful links, resources and tutorials, design related chatter. So to start: I’m currently working on two websites, the first has been going on for a while now but hasn’t seen much attention recently. It’s a site for Pneuma youth events, which are held at Carshalton Beeches Baptist Church. The address, pneumaevents.com, currently displays a holding page but the final site, which is built on Wordpress, should be up within the next month. This is the same ‘brand’ for which I have already designed a range of promotional printed materials over the past couple of years, which can be seen here, here and here.
The second site is a complete redesign of the site for Brunel University sailing club. Currently located at brunelsailing.com and running on MS Office Live (fail), the new website is also built on Wordpress and boasts a high degree of functionality due to an extensive use of plugins. This site is almost ready for deployment and will be up (at the same URL) within 1-2 weeks.
After months of very little attention and pitifully few updates, I’ve finally got my act together and given this site a bit of a makeover. So what’s new? Well, the overall layout has changed quite drastically, though I have kept certain key design features the same (such as the weird green sparkly background thing). I’ve added this blog section (all the cool kids were doing it), a nifty slideshow for the front page, and because the whole thing hooks into Wordpress I can take advantage of cool features like RSS.
I’ve added some new work too, I recommend you take a look at the flash game I recently finished entitled ‘Martian Green’, as well as a website design for young people interested in politics called ‘We Do Politics’ that I created for a university assignment.
I’m still ironing out a few kinks and bugs, but please have a poke around and see what you think.
