I LOVED this exercise.

I always struggle (like most of us) to create a portfolio for myself. I'm constantly iterating, changing, adjusting, scrapping, fine-tuning, and pivoting. And those are only the concepts I like! I think it's the bane of the designer's existence.

Except for the fact that we love it.

We love to push our design muscles to the breaking point, and to see how our skills have progressed from the last project (read: portfolio design).

This class helped me by giving me the tools to trust my instincts, based on the creative prompts, and to iterate quickly. That's one of my biggest pitfalls - when I take too much time and don't give myself that constraint, as on a project.

I started with a sketch of the homepage for my new site. I knew that I wanted to include my latest work as well as a tagline of myself.

Portfolio Exploration - image 1 - student project

After that, I hopped into Photoshop. I had a need for a background image, but didn't have a specific one in mind; so I took this as an opportunity to use the Craft Photoshop plugin from InVision. Spoiler Alert: it's awesome.

Here's the first version of the homepage:

Portfolio Exploration - image 2 - student project

I was excited to try some of the creative prompts, so the first ones I chose were:

Add some symmetry
Further saturate the colors

Here is the result:

Portfolio Exploration - image 3 - student project

From here, I tried these prompts:

Free up some elements and let them flow
Experiment with the opacity of things
Make it less "safe"
Experiment with a completely new palette
Change your main typography with something completely different

Result is:

Portfolio Exploration - image 4 - student project

Next, I chose these prompts:

Create more whitespace
Section things off
Change the graphical pathways and alignments
Pick favorite 3 components and delete the rest. (My 3 favorite were the tagline, case study, and nav).

Result is:

Portfolio Exploration - image 5 - student project

For the fifth iteration, I chose the following prompts:

Add a design flourish
Mix the elements up
Section things off

Result is:

Portfolio Exploration - image 6 - student project

And finally, for the last iteration. These are the prompts I used:

Group similar content / elements
Grayscale the entire composition and see what stands out
Add a design flourish

The result:

Portfolio Exploration - image 7 - student project

I'm still not sure which concept is my favorite, however this has helped me figure out good starting positions.

Thank you very much for reading :) I would be glad to answer any questions that you may have. I hope this is helpful for you all!

Alex Wright

Senior Product Designer & Dev

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