PortfoliNO? PortfoliYES!

In this episode, Meg shares tips for boosting your online presence as a designer and how to create a portfolio that reflects your unique personality. Plus, she digs into the latest news stories like whether putting IKEA furniture in a museum is art, and why movie villains never use iPhones!

This episode is brought to you by .ME, the most personal internet domain that puts your signature on your work. Take control over your online brand and show your prospective clients how awesome you are! Whether you decide on a YourNameSurname.ME combination or a well-known alias for your domain name, .ME is uniquely positioned to provide you with the space you need to create a captivating online persona that’s a direct reflection of you.

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Links mentioned in this episode:

• 3 essential steps to boosting your online presence as a designer
• Had a baby it’s a boy Geico ad

Transcript

Meg: Well, hidey-ho buddies! Welcome back to Dribbble Overtime. I’m your host, Meg “We had a baby it’s a boy” Lewis, and this is a super special episode because I’m all alone and I’m feeling very self-conscious about it. You know it is really hard to talk to a microphone with no one staring at me. I don’t know where to put my eyes. And I don’t know if anybody finds anything I say to be interesting or funny because nobody’s nodding or laughing in response to me. It’s very hard, but I’m just going to have to power through because this is my job. By the way, “We had a baby, it’s a boy” is a niche reference to a very obscure commercial. It was late 90s, early 2000s time and I want to make that a call out. I did not have a baby. It is not a boy because there’s no baby that was had by me. Maybe you had a baby it’s a boy. Congratulations!

In this episode, I give you a gentle shake and slap on the face and tell you to stop obsessing over your portfolio because I’m going to give you the tips on how to make a great portfolio that does you justice. I also contemplate popping an Ikea sofa into a museum and does that make that art? And I forget that Apple won’t let villains use iPhones in movies and that is just about the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. So come on, let’s go.

Okay, so for the first news story I want to cover, it’s actually a blog post that Dribbble launched where I was already going to talk about this topic on the episode. And then they’ve launched this blog post and I thought, “Oh, very interesting. Our interests are overlapping.” But Dribbble released a blog post that’s titled “Essential steps to boosting your online presence as a designer.” And I’m going to kind of go through their points and give you my take on them. But I will expand on this later in this episode.

But I look at notes while I’m talking. And I have this problem where my hands, you know, whenever your hands are typing, and there’s a word really similar to a word that you type a lot, so your hands just automatically type that other word that’s not the word you want to type. I do that with the word “blog.” For some reason, my hands, my fingers always type “blob” instead of “blog,” which shouldn’t come as a surprise to you. But it really does come as a surprise to me because, “Come on hands.” Certainly, I’ve typed “blog” more than “blob” in my life, but I guess not, I don’t know. Anyway, I have in my notes, “Dribbble blog post,” which is just silly.

Anyway, Dribbble launched this blog post about boosting your online presence as a designer. And this is something that I love to talk about and could talk about all day long. And I think it’s really fun that they’ve posted about it because I love seeing other people’s takes on similar topics that I talk about and digesting how their take is different from mine. And I also really always encourage other people to listen and read all the takes and all sides of an issue just so that you have a more well-rounded view on the topic. So, if anybody’s ever telling you what to do with your portfolio like I’m going to today, I recommend seeking the advice of others so you can have more opinions. That’s always good. That’s how we become more educated and open minded and so on. And then you can figure out what resonates with you, which I love. Don’t just take one person and set of advice and run with it.

Anyway, so Dribbble says the first key to boosting your online presence as a designer, is to create a website portfolio that showcases your personality. And I totally agree with that. Who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t agree with creating a portfolio online that has personality that’s reflective of you. Of course, that’s a core mission of mine. It’s a lesson I always teach people, a lesson I’ve taught myself many times. And I think that Dribbble makes a good point. They say that there are so many tools at our disposal right now that will help you add personality to a website in a way that your designer brain can handle in case you can’t code or if you’re like me and you don’t like to code. Like, we have Squarespace, we have Wix, we have Cargo, we have Big Cartel. We’ve got a lot of media out there that is helping us create things with our designer brains and helping us customize them the way we like it, which I think is really cool. So yes, I agree with dribble on that. Create a website portfolio that showcases your personality; check.

The second tip that they have is telling your brand story on your website, which, to them, means listing out what you do for a living, what services you offer, and just kind of making sure that you’re covering all the facts about who you are and what you’re doing, which I agree with, and I will explain how I think that you can expand on that. I think that Dribbble’s take is very interesting, though, because they’re approaching it as storytelling, which I think is fascinating. Like, of course, that’s going to make for a more well-rounded personal brand, is if you’re actually telling a story. Now, I realized that it’s probably really hard to translate who you are at your core to a story that other people can easily digest. Now, that is the hard part. Dribbble, tell us what to do. How do we do that?

And lastly, they say, create a personalized domain name. I do that a lot. My URL is DarnGood.co but I also bought the domain name Butt.Guru, which will point to DarnGood.co. And at the time, I bought it because I just thought it’d be an interesting extension of my personal brand, but I think the point that Dribbble’s making is that your domain name is totally an extension of who you are. And as part of the experience you’re creating for people, when they’re ingesting your website, they’re ingesting your work, they’re ingesting your personality and a domain name can help with that. So more on this later. I’m going to cover this in greater detail, but let’s move on to the next story.

So, Fast Company released this article recently, titled “If you sneak IKEA furniture into a museum, is it art?” And I think this is hilarious. And the reason why they wrote it is because there’s an artist named Max Siedentopf. Siedentopf. I did it right, I think. Sorry, Max. Let me know if I didn’t.

So, Max used the augmented reality app that IKA released called “IKEA Place” where IKEA allows you to hold your phone’s camera up and plop IKEA furniture into the space that you’re in and see it falsely placed in that space. So, I guess the real use case is that if you’re in your living room, and you’re like, “Man, I wonder how this table looks in my living room,” you can plop the IKEA table image into your space and you can move it around and see where it fits best or if it doesn’t fit in the space, etc. But Max had a little bit of fun with it. And Max is an artist and has always wanted to see their work in Tate Modern. And so, I think that’s pretty fascinating because Max just popped into Tate Modern and started using IKEA place to pop furniture in the space with the art and everything. And the piece that Max created is called imaginary sculptures.

And I particularly love it because there’s a video of the whole imaginary sculptures experiment on the Fast Company article. We’ll link to it in the show notes. But I think it’s really funny because sometimes the furniture in the space looks really silly and ridiculous because it’s like a lot of furniture smushed together and piled on top of itself. And there are people walking around it and it’s very just, it’s funny to see the furniture just kind of smushed in a public space with a lot of people.

But then other times, there’s just, like, a clean white room, a museum room, with a single piece of very IKEA-like furniture in it. And as soon as it gets into that sort of scenario, it looks really real. I could definitely imagine a velvet rope around it with a “Do not touch” sign. And I don’t know, I don’t know, any better. I wouldn’t know. I think that this project is particularly fun because it’s silly. And you know, I like things that are silly or taking traditionally pretty serious or well-respected topics and making them a little bit more lighthearted and fun. Why not?

I think that if you bring to people or came at it from a malicious intent of saying, “Hey, art snobs, see how much you just paid for this art? It was IKEA all along!” I don’t think that’s fun. That’s just mean and rude. But I think this is a harmless piece of fun interactivity. And I think it’s fun to have, you know, this thought provoking conversation of like, “Oh, if you pop an IKEA piece into a museum, does it then become art?” I don’t have an answer because I’m not well informed about Fine Art enough to have an answer. But I think it’s pretty silly. And you know, I love silly.

And another thing that I love so much about it is the fact that, you know, okay, so this happens to me a lot when I’m shopping for clothing and you go to a store, like, Forever 21 where all the clothes are just kind of draped off the hangers and thrown around. And people have no respect for the clothing or the environment, or the people that work there. And everybody just kind of tosses stuff around because it’s so cheap, and they probably aren’t thinking at all. And then you walk into a very expensive clothing store that is extremely minimal. And if you took a piece from Forever 21 and then all of a sudden moved it into that fancy store, you’d automatically, because of the experiential design, and what you’re expecting in that environment, you’re going to probably spend more on the same piece. And I find that so fascinating.

And I think that the same thing is happening here with popping a piece of IKEA furniture into a fancy gallery or museum. I think that’s hilarious. And what does value mean? How do we create value? And I think as a designer, I think that’s really an interesting thing to observe and to know. Because we often are in charge of creating these experiences where things live. And we have such major control over the way people perceive products and the value of those products. And I don’t know, I often feel very out of control, like I’m just hurling at the sun. And realizing that I have that much control over the experience and how much value an object is perceived to have is pretty freakin fascinating. That is a side tangent that I’ve now gone on in relation to this IKEA furniture in a museum thing, but hey, at least I brought it back to design. So maybe I’m staying on topic with this podcast after all. And for this last news story, I think it’s hilarious. I saw this as a headline and had to click on it. The headline was, “Apple Won’t Let Villains Use iPhones.” And this all came about because Rian Johnson, we all know Rian as the director of the movie “Knives Out” and a bunch of other things. But Ryan was on a press junket or something and recorded a video with Vanity Fair breaking down a scene in that movie. And accidentally, or maybe not accidentally, let out the fact that, of course, one of the villains wouldn’t be holding an iPhone because Apple won’t let villains use iPhones in movies.

And that information is so silly to me because honestly, product placement is not something I know that much about. It’s one of those things where I don’t really want to take a peek under the hood because it might ruin movies for me. And realizing that they have very explicit rules about what villains can or cannot use is hilarious to me. And also, in the sense of a whodunit kind of movie, realizing this information now is going to make it so much more fun to me to try and pick out who the villain is. Like, are all of the characters using iPhones but one of them is using a Samsung? Is that the killer? Hmmm, interesting.

And this whole thing reminds me of watching the show “House Hunters.” Okay, this may be a spoiler alert. If you don’t want a spoiler about the show “House Hunters,” then don’t listen ahead. But the way that “House Hunters” works is, you know, the people that are on the show looking for a house, in reality, they’ve already found the house and they’re already in the process of closing and it’s been found and done. And then they’re faking the rest, they’re faking the whole show. So, all the houses that they’ve seen, the house they actually bought, is mixed in with the total of three houses that they see. And what I love to do is pick up on their subtle cues and body language to figure out which one they’re faking it with, because the other two it’s like, okay, we’re looking at these two for the show. We don’t really know these houses, but one of them is the house that they chose that they’ve been in before and they know it. And so usually they give the cue of, they’ll say stuff like, “I’ve never seen this before,” or they’ll go out of their way to do grandiose body gestures, and they’ll say things that are a little different than the they did in the other houses.

Now imagine if they were holding iPhones in two of the houses and a Samsung in the other house, in the third house, then that would be really great. That’d be a fun game I’d like to play.

Now, let’s talk a little bit more about portfolios because I just came from a portfolio review trip at the University of Florida and I saw a lot, and I felt like I was just saying the same things over and over again. And that’s not because everybody was making the same mistakes. It’s just that I like to, whenever I’m looking at people’s portfolios, or having a take on them, I like to have a take that’s unique to me. And that’s exactly what’s about to happen here. I’m going to give some opinions on what I think portfolios should have. And again, I encourage you to seek the advice of other people that aren’t me so you can get different takes so you can have a more well-rounded view of how to approach this.

But what I like to do whenever I’m redesigning my own portfolio site or thinking about my website is I like to first cater to 95% of the people that are on there that are just scanning. Because normally when somebody’s looking at my website or yours, they are either comparing you to a bunch of other creatives or they’ve stumbled across your presence, and they’ve clicked on that link, and they’re like, “Who is this person? What’s happening? And we don’t have time anymore.” We are all in hurry. We don’t spend much time anywhere. So, we are just scrolling through and taking in visuals and a few words, and normally we move on. If something really piques our interest, then we’ll click into it, and we’ll find out more. And so, I want you to design your portfolio so that way, you’re catering to those scanners, because that’s most of the people that will be on there. And how do you do that?

The first thing I like to do is create a sort of one sentence probably max. It could be a long sentence, your choice description of who you are, what you do and what makes your work great. So, for me, I usually say something like, “Meg Lewis is a brand or experienced designer, creating fun personal designs, working to make the world a happier place.” And that sentence is really helpful because it helps people to understand where I’m coming from, what I do, and what makes me special. Like, what makes my work really interesting and unique to me. And that sentence is just a sentence. So, people can scan and read it and pick up on those key phrase words throughout the sentence, and it’s easy. And then, as I decide what work to put in the rest of the page on the homepage, I say what work proves that statement about me the most. And that’s the work that I include in my portfolio. And that is just such a relief to have a baseline of knowing what to include and what not to include in a portfolio.

So, I do a thing where I personally say, “Here’s the statement amount me, and here’s the work that visually backs that up. And if you want to see more work, you can expand and see more,” and I try to make sure that all the work in my portfolio really, really proves the statement I’m making about myself. But I also have a PDF version if somebody is like, “Meg we liked all the work we see but do you have any niche poodle jobs that you’ve done? #PoodleJobs! I’ve never done a poodle job, I would like to though.

But so, if somebody asked me if I have any specific reference files of anything I’ve done in a very niche area, I have a lot of work that’s done in my portfolio. So, I have a master sort of PDF deck of all my work that I keep just in case somebody wants it or ask for it, I can email it to them. But for the stuff that goes on my website, I make sure that it’s proving the statement that I’m making about myself, because for the scanners, it helps create a cohesive, unified look, that makes sense to who we are. And it depends on if you’re on the problem-solving design side of the spectrum, or if you’re on the designer, more artist side of the spectrum. I fall closer to the artist side. So, visuals and the artist statement that I’m making in the visuals is really important. Whereas if your sentence that you are describing about yourself with is more about research and thought process and problem solving, then you can showcase work that is in a range of styles. That’s totally encouraged. And it helps back up your statement, okay?

So, in order to figure out what that statement is, I think it’s important that you just start list-making and make lists about what about your personality makes you unique, and what those specific parts of your skill set you have that make you really special are as well. And then also make a list about what makes working with you great from either a co-worker’s perspective, a boss’ perspective, or a client’s perspective, it’s your choice.

So, make those three lists of qualities, skill set, and what makes working with you great, and decide which of those list parts and keywords there are most important and kind of create a hierarchy to them. Because if for some reason, fun or play or thoughtful, those are keywords that are the most important to you, you’ll know to work those into one sentence. And what I like to do then is for the scanners, if their interest is piqued, hopefully it is, they go to your about page and you can work in all of your keywords into the copy that you’re writing about yourself, which I think is really cool. Because you can expand on that and really let people know who you are, what makes you special, and what services and skills you have to offer, which is great. And also, I think that, remember that your portfolio, your website is not just about the visuals that you’re showing. So much of it is about the writing. And not even necessarily the content of the writing, it’s the style in which you write. Your brand voice as a human, as a creative providing services for people, needs to be reflective of who you are so that people that want to work with you can see that personality shine on your website so that way, first of all, they want to work with you because they think you’re an interesting person that they want to be around. But also, when you finally meet them in person and hang out with them in real life or have an interview, they know who you are, and you don’t have to pretend to be some sort of like, different version or curated version of yourself, which feels really good to finally just be able to show up to an interview and be yourself because they already know who that person is.

So, when it comes to writing the copy, write it in your own voice, choose a style of writing that sounds really reflective of your personality. Don’t feel like you need to switch into academic writing mode, which is what a lot of us are taught. You don’t have to do that. Sound like yourself. If you are really academic in the way that you speak, then that’s okay, you can do that. But most of us aren’t. Most of us are taught pretty informally and I think as long as you’re communicating the points that you’re trying to make about how thoughtful you are, or whatever these bullet points are, make sure you inject those into your copy, but write in a way that feels reflective of your own voice. Because a personal brand, and your website is more than just visual work. It’s the copy. It’s the entire experience. It’s what your domain name is, we use social media, all of that.

And I think as you make these changes, if you take my advice and you don’t like it, or you feel uncomfortable about it, or you change and grow, just remember that all of this can change and grow with you. But the nice thing about this process is that your portfolio will end up being more reflective of who you are and what makes you you at your core, which will ultimately make your portfolio feel better to you. And hopefully, that discontent feeling that you always have about changing your portfolio and feeling bad about it slowly starts to shut away. And just know that as you grow, as you change, or if you just don’t like the changes that you make, you can just change it back. Yes. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to get it right this one time and know that you can always change it back. That’s okay. Just don’t get in your way to where you don’t try anything new with your website or don’t make any decisions. You can just try something and change it back if you don’t like it.

I have some exciting news. We are setting up a hot, hot hotline starting today for Dribbble Overtime. So, call the number. It’s 1-833-DEZIGNZ. That’s 1-833-DEZIGNZ spelled with some “Z’s” in a weird way. And leave an audio recording of your most embarrassing design question. And you know what? Your recording plus my answer might be featured on the podcast. That’s 1-833-DEZIGNZ. No question is too embarrassing, I promise.

And that’s it for this week’s episode of Dribbble Overtime. Let’s continue the conversation on the internet with #DribbbleOvertime. And if you loved this episode, please let us know. Leave a review and stuff, subscribe. Bloopy bloop bloop. And don’t forget to tweet or tag me, Meg Lewis on the internet. I am @DarnGooood. That’s @DarnGooood with four “O’s.” Bye, hear me next week!