Final Project Proposal: Design Portfolio Website

Project Summary

For my final project in Critical Making 1 I intend to develop a portfolio website. The purpose of creating a portfolio is to showcase my best designs on a site that I will create from scratch to show future employers my capabilities and skills in UX, branding and web development.

The problem that I have is that I currently have no way to showcase my capabilities and skills within design to future employers. When I am done with the final project, I will solve the problem by bridging the gap between my work and employer interests. Hopefully after the completion of this project I will be able to attract employers by showcasing my design portfolio website.

As a designer, an online portfolio can help you attract new clients or score your dream job. A portfolio is for publishing your most compelling work samples as a valuable promotional tool that can expand your professional opportunities. The goal for my project is to show off some coding language by creating a self-hosted website because I will be building my website from the ground up. I will also consider navigation and design in the process, making it easy to navigate around the site so that visitors can easily find what they are looking for. To do this I will resize and compress every image, make it easy to contact me, and strive to make navigating my site a delightful, straightforward experience.

My online portfolio is not only about technically creating it, but promoting my work is key to maximize the value of my efforts. I will work on design projects from my undergrad as well as from my grad program and share my designs in design community websites to publish my work and receive feedback from other creatives. This is the best way to network, and get comments from others which can help improve my work for my portfolio site.

The challenges that I anticipate are going to be within coding, and creating a valuable and meaningful structure of my website. Even though we’ve worked a lot with Visual Studio Code implementing different frameworks and libraries, it will definitely be challenging to create something from scratch designing my own layout and page structure. Also, creating multiple pages within one webpage linkable to different pages like: about, contact, and projects will be challenging because I have never done this before.

My project will relate to my other work in entrepreneurial design and UX design because my designs that I will showcase in my portfolio emphasize systems-oriented approach to entrepreneural design. I want my portfolio to provide visitors with a project-based environment consisting of my design projects that touches on experience design and product development. In my designs I also want to show my skills in product development methodologies, user research, industrial design, information design, visual and identity design, the design of physical spaces and screen based interaction design as well as design for emerging human-computer interfaces.

Key Components

To realize my final project I will need to use Visual Studio Code to write code. I will also use GitHub to publish and save my codes on my profile for reference. I will also have to buy a domain and a shared hosting service. For my designs, I will work in different adobe creative cloud applications to improve my designs.

I want to achieve high fidelity with my website. I also want my wireframes and prototype projects to have high fidelity.

The main material I will use will be my computer and then I will be using software within my computer such as Visual Studio Code and Terminal.

I have done a fair amount of research on design portfolios and these are the items that I will include in my portfolio:

• Ways to describe each portfolio item
• Online platforms that combine flexibility and usability
• Ways to optimize your portfolio for viewers
• Tactics for promoting work

I will still need to do research on how to identify work samples to share, telling a story to each project, choosing a web platform and optimizing my website.

Milestones

I will buy a domain and shared hosting here when I have finished my coding.

The questions I have are: how to add some short text on my images introducing each project, giving a short description about each project. Also when using W3Schools online web tutorials, I am not sure how to change distance between images, and margins.

I feel like I am lacking skills in applying W3.CSS classes so that it fits the layout and design that I have already coded. I think that inspecting different portfolio webpages in chrome will be very helpful. I think that I would need assistance in the w3 container classes.