Building a Starter Portfolio

Goals for this lesson:

• Create a project case study
• Build a starter portfolio: a case study and a profile page
• Understand how to maintain and update your portfolio over time

Creating Your Project Case Study

What to consider when selecting a case study:

• Complete or logical design process
• Reflects key core skills, tools, and activities
• Strong connection between solution and challenge
• Compelling reflection on the results or outcomes

Example;

When selecting a case study, what factors in a project are important to consider?

• Alligment between challenges and solution
• Relevence of skill, tool or experienc

Creating a Case Study Prototype

Process for creating a project case study:

• Collect and organize your project process and artifacts
• Create a content and assets inventory
• Reflect on the project story
• Articulate the key challenge
• Select key insights, decisions, challenges, and opportunities to discuss
• Discuss the solution and impact
• Design a case study layout/format

Building Your Starter Portfolio

Finalizing Your Case Study:

• Get feedback on your portfolio content and design
• Aim for at least 2–3 reviewers
• Summarize and prioritize the feedback
• Revise and iterate accordingly

Professional associations for design community:

• User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA): https://uxpa.org/
• Interaction Design Association (IxDA): https://ixda.org/
• American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA): https://www.aiga.org/
• Association for Computing Machinery / Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction (SIGCHI): https://sigchi.org/

Maintaining Your Portfolio

Checklist for preparing your content:

• Organize and name/label your content
• Standardize any visual content that’s a part of a series or a group
• Optimize the file or image quality and size for web
• Prepare any alt tags or captions if transferring to web

Selecting a Portfolio Website:

• Ease of use when recreating your format online
• Basic and Advanced Features
• Cost and maintenance
• Domain or custom URL
• Custom design or templates

Starter Portfolio: Final Checks & Publishing

Completing Final Portfolio Checks:

• Is all of your content properly transferred and in the place?
• Have you done a quality check?
• Typos: Spelling and grammar
• Layout: Alignment
• Visuals quality
• Functionality: Broken links
• Navigation: Organization and flow
• Accessibility: Captions
• Do you need to password protect anything?

Designing for the Portfolio Experience

Designing a Good Portfolio Experience:

• Characteristics
• Navigation
• Readability
• Usability or ease of use
• Consistency and quality
• Personalized
• Elements
• Navigation
• Complete projects
• Contact information or form
• Social media links or other digital presence
• Resume or work experience content
• Available as web or mobile version

Maintaining Your Portfolio

Good Portfolio Maintenance:

• Include 4–6 project case studies in your portfolio
• Regularly add and remove case studies as you complete projects and grow your skills
• Create a personal process for capturing your process and artifacts as you go to make case studies easier to create
• Apply your own approach to maintaining versions of your portfolio
• Archive old projects (but don’t delete them)

Reflection as a Regular Portfolio Practice

Portfolio as Reflecting Your Journey:

• Regularly review your completed and in-process projects
• Take inventory of where and how your skills and expertise have evolved
• Revisit your goals and vision for career development and growth
• Continue to pursue and include projects that speak to the work you want to do

Key tips to remember:

Apply the design process to your portfolio
Remember that portfolio is a communication and storytelling tool
Evolve your portfolio content to reflect your interests and journey
Create a process to maintain your portfolio in a sustainable way

Helpful Resources

• Keynote: https://www.apple.com/keynote/
• PowerPoint: https://products.office.com/en-us/powerpoint

Free Portfolio Building Websites. For free portfolio websites to make your portfolio digital and available online:

• Cargo: https://cargo.site/
• Adobe Portfolio: https://portfolio.adobe.com/ (free with Creative Cloud)
• Dribble: https://dribbble.com/
• Behance: https://www.behance.net/
• Carbonmade: http://carbonmade.com
• Google Sites: https://sites.google.com/
• Webflow: https://webflow.com/
• Wordpress: https://wordpress.org
• Free Images and Photos. For free visual content such as photos or images to help visually enhance your case study:
• Unsplash: http://www.unsplash.com
• Shutterstock: https://www.shutterstock.com/explore/royalty-free-images
• Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/
• Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/
• Freephotos.cc: https://freephotos.cc/
• Burst by Shopify: https://burst.shopify.com/free-images
• StockSnap.io: https://stocksnap.io/
• Reshot: https://www.reshot.com/
• Foodiesfeed.com: https://www.foodiesfeed.com/
• Kaboompics.com: https://kaboompics.com/