Don’t get me wrong, Lightbox is great, but it’s current ubiquity diminishes my portfolio’s uniqueness. And for a site that’s meant to win the hearts of clients, that really won’t do. So now what?

Well, first, the dilemmas.

Clicking vs. Scrolling
Right now, I’m in sort of a middle ground. Each family of thumbnails fits quit comfortably on most modern displays, with scrolling required to travel from section to section, and full size images viewable by either clicking on each thumbnail or clicking one thumbnail in a family and cycling through via Lightbox. I’d like to move more towards one or the other to simplify navigation. Given the current layout’s relatively narrow width³, I’m inclined to go with scrolling. Ok, let’s do that. First problem solved.

Diversity vs. Focus
Unfortunately, the majority of the pieces shown in my portfolio are either outdated (the oldest thing on there was designed four years ago) or irrelevant to my working goals. Nine out of twenty total pieces are illustrations, and let’s be honest, illustration is a hobby for me, not a profession. Almost everything I have in the Design section was either done for school or as a personal exercise. Since web design is the profession I’ve decided to stick to, I need to cut back on the presence of both my illustration work and non-web related design work. Ideally, I should probably allow my web work to stand on its own, but I don’t think I’ve done enough to cut the other sections completely.

Content vs. Brevity
How much of a single piece should I show? Web design, particularly of the dynamic variety, is difficult to represent in one or two screenshots. The obvious answer seems to be a simple live link, but if the design ever changes after I’ve moved on, it becomes useless, although I suppose if a site I’ve worked on gets redesigned, it probably shouldn’t be something I keep in my portfolio anyway. So maybe a screenshot or two accompanied by a good description and a live link isn’t such a bad idea after all.

Ok, let’s do this⁴.

Thanks, Wordpress.

I knew we had something special.

“How can I say this as nicely as possible?”

This is my job as a designer. To take shit and turn it into gold. Shit, you understand, it’s not even like I’m taking scrap metals and transmuting them into a precious metal. Nope, I just gallop right on by alchemy atop my twenty-foot-tall horse and bitch slap it with the Hand-of-Midas.

Have you read this before? Are you sure? Then you’re probably not one of us. This is what we read. This is what we write. Articulate, sophisticated, observant, and inspired. Verbose, obscure, referential, and patronizing. Whether we love ourselves or hate ourselves, we know we’re better than the luddite masses incapable of what we do. We wouldn’t even be in this field otherwise.

Incontrovertibly, our very livelihood depends on shooting down inferior thoughts and stepping up to replace them with our own masterful conceptions. So when our thought-out, neatly-packaged, highly-prized, and cleanly-presented ideas are challenged, it’s in our nature to fight for them tooth and nail. For most of us, this means defending our designs from the filthy, pedestrian hands of our clients. Those of us who either look down on journalism or feel that it’s beyond our grasp yet choose to write anyway, attempt to pre-empt any sort of contention by using big words and name-dropping as many esoteric references as possible. We also love our hyphens. Hyphens make you look smart.

But what about everyone else? As I write this, my classmates discuss the unfortunate run-ins they’ve had with bourgeoisie unfamiliar with the concept of Graphic Design™. Living, iron-clad proof of my point, conveniently observed from my ivory tower of truth and solitude. They are right, though. It’s a pain in the ass to explain this crap to philistines. God knows, I can’t even explain it to my parents.

I recently attended a family reunion. You know, the kind where you see forty aunts and uncles that can’t believe how much you’ve grown up. The kind where everyone wants to know what you’re doing in school now. Graphic Design. What the hell is that? Well, uncle Hector, it’s- and I’m already getting a blank stare here- well, I’ll probably use it to go into advertising. Do I plan on making a career out of advertising? Fuck no, but no one here is going to care enough to listen to what I think typography is or the niggling differences between art and design. I mean, honestly, besides us, who cares? And that’s it right there, I guess. No one else cares about the inner workings.

As far an outsider is concerned, our job is to make things look pretty. If he doesn’t like the way it looks, no amount of justification is going to change that. And who’s to say he’s wrong? What makes him the asshole? How about Susan Sontag, claiming that outside interpretation is a fate worse than death? Is she the asshole? Elliott Earls? He seems to think it’s not only cute when something is misread, but vital to it having any sort of life. Is he the asshole? And here I am, a wet-behind-the-ears college student writing about how wrong everybody is. So I’m clearly an asshole. Then who’s the real asshole? To be quite honest, we’re all assholes whether we like it or not.

By the way, we’re using italics, and hyphens now, so try to keep up.

Inevitably, someone is going to read this and be offended by it, and while that very thought warms my heart, that’s pretty pathetic. Even worse, however, is that someone- probably the type to actually use the word “bohemian” in a self-description- is going to agree with it too. The only people I respect are those who won’t care either way. Interpretation be damned, I’ve said my piece for my own reasons, and no one will ever know why for sure. This truth is my own, and though you may borrow it, it will never be yours. And that makes me an existential dick. Excuse me, asshole.

Comments are welcome in the space provided.

(available in pretty PDF form here)

Campus Compass series 1

Now, I’m sure there are plenty of issues with every single one of the above logos. I know this because I hate them. If someone else had done these and asked me what I thought of them, I could tell them precisely why they’re terrible. But because I’ve spent so much intimate time with them, I internally rationalize anything wrong with the overall picture. This is perilous. I’m hoping that by writing these things down, I’ll be able to break out of this habit.

reSACK logo idea 1

In other news, Doug and I got “design cock blocked” today when we discovered that the guy who hired us to redesign his site didn’t actually have permission to do so from the community he had licensed it from. We might be able to change the header slightly but it seems like that’s about it.

Buffalo Grapevine logo redesign 1

I still need to come up with something for Ben’s inanimate object political campaign. I have a fall-back idea involving a smear campaign, but for an assignment which was practically written for me, I don’t want to have to settle for a reserve idea. Hopefully I’ll manage to come up with something in the shower tomorrow. That’s where I get all of my best ideas, really.