The New & Improved Dynamic Self
Posted: August 8th, 2009 | Author: Matt | Filed under: Internet | Tags: design, goals, Internet, personal | No Comments »I’ve been retooling my personal portfolio site this past week. Any designer will tell you that portfolio sites are a cruel, unforgiving monster. Almost always, as soon as you finish all the work of concepting, coding, and design, you look back at the finish piece and feel disappointed. Because that site just isn’t you, and just can’t do a good enough job of representing you. And almost always, you’re too tired to care at this point – so that’s what goes online. And it haunts you every time someone asks for a link to your site, because in your heart you know if it’s not good enough for you then it certainly isn’t good enough to share with the rest of the world – and certainly not fit for sharing with potential employers who literally wear pants made out of money and would like to possibly give you some.
So designing a portfolio site is exhausting work. And I’m not going to share it until it’s done, which hopefully won’t be too terribly long from now. But I can share some ideas I have about it, and the crazy thoughts that have come along with it.
I want my new portfolio site to be an absolute celebration of dynamic content. I want the traditional elements of a portfolio to be there, the biography, the resume, all well presented. But I also want to make it fun and interesting. I want it prove that I’m intelligent and sort of well-rounded or at least not completely retarded outside the scope of my work. (Not that my portfolio would lead you to believe I’m some sort of creative savant, or anything.) And the way to do that today is twofold: First, you supply interesting content of your own – blogs, photographs, side projects, video, microposts, etc. And second, you show that you’re engaged with the rest of the world. You show other people’s content that you really like, because that will always say more about who you are and especially who you want to be and have the potential to be than what you’ve created to this point.
Plus, and maybe this is just me, I always think other people’s lives are more interesting than my own.
Obviously there’s a danger there in overwhelming your own work with that of other people, and I think it’s a concept that works for some portfolios better than others. Personally, I’m trying not to box myself to a design career, and I’m thinking a lot of about social media, viral marketing, and augmented reality. So I’m trying to show a little interdisciplinary flair here, and hopefully it’ll work out.
Okay, now here is where this post gets interesting.
Assume you want to own your online profile entirely. You want your site to be a portrait of authenticity, a portal to yourself. So you want your twitter, blog, flickr, last.fm, etc all lined up in a row so there’s no mistaking who Matthew is. This stuff is all cool, but pretty basic. Why not try something more unique, more interesting? Previously you’d need to dabble around in webapp API toolboxes and, man, I am just not ready for that level of development shenanigans. But it’s becoming increasingly easier to tether data from multiple applications together and produce unique (and extremely cool) applications of your own. Yahoo! Pipes, which I discovered today, has suddenly made this a lot easier.
So what’s to stop you from linking your latitude/longitude via iPhone gps to a flickr widget that will constantly display new images from your exact current location? Why wouldn’t you create a robot to trawl the internet to search for pictures of anorexic midget clown porn (that got your attention) to automate your new photoblog? Who is going to walk up to you and say, “No, Matthew, you cannot create a “The Path of Matthew” page that displays, historically, exactly where you have been for the past year as a moving icon on Google maps?
No one is going to stop you. The only thing stopping you is utility. How useful would these machinations be? We’re approaching a time where anyone with basic web design skills can assemble an app that does truly stunning things, and all you need is an imagination. So get in while the getting is good. Make something cool before someone else does it first, and then share the coolest things other people have done with the rest of the world. That’s how you make your portfolio something to be proud of.
