This is overall a pretty good CD/CSIT learning portfolio
though still not exactly great. I
give it credit for having some very impressive examples of the person’s work
and the design of the portfolio is at least ambitious but it’s also thoroughly
amateur. It doesn’t feel like I’m
looking at someone’s professional portfolio so much as I am just looking at a student project, if this
was my site I wouldn’t spread it around.
I think my big problem is that god awful big picture stamp right in the
upper right corner, it just looks wrong and off and doesn’t exactly jive with
the overall aesthetic of the page.
The visual design of the portfolio feels like it’s a funducation page
about the American revolution from a local museum in Connecticut that didn’t
have a ton of money to spend on the page and they blew most of it registering a
domain name. Maybe the big human face
focus could work if this was meant to showcase Miguel’s comedy talent as a
designer, sort of like the cover of Weird Al’s mandatory fun but as is it just
looks slapdash and non-committal, like he couldn’t decided between being bland
and generic or cheap and tonally confused so he combined both.
This is just bland as far as portfolios go, and I mean
blander than bland, I’m talking eating plain crackers with nothing on them and
following it up with some tap water and plain white bread untoasted. The color design seems like it should
work all playing off a combination of ice tones and sea foam but it creates
this very blended look that makes the page looks far too vast and empty, like
the text are just little freckles of activity in this blank and pitiless
environment. I like some of the
examples of work like the T-shirts and the trip wise brochure all look very
nice, especially the brochure, which, if I didn’t know better, I’d have
actually thought was a real in use thing.
Mainly though my take away was that there seems to be a rule that says
all project must be intensely boring because if I didn’t actively have the web
portfolios up at this moment I probably couldn’t tell you about any of them
despite having spent a good 8 minutes going through the entire site. They’re just all very milk toast and
general, I suppose that’s the point, that these are jobs and business portfolios
because the best use of your time at school is designing milk toast examples of
your skill to impress local businesses.
I don’t know maybe it’s just me but there’s really very little here I’d
feel proud of if I had made them, I’d be proud of the money I’d earned from
doing them I suppose but not the end product itself, I get that not every
design project needs to reinvent the wheel but shouldn’t you want to showcase
the projects where you did reinvent the wheel? Again I suppose you could throw up the big disclaimer of
this is just a means to an end, the end being getting hired but that can’t be a
goal in and of itself, there’s got to be more to it than that. I suppose it’s possible both of these
people just have the ultra-simplistic life goal of find job and don’t starve,
enjoying the simple pleasures of consumable media and gainful employment but
that just strikes me as an intensely unfulfilling lifestyle, no one should
obsess over just getting hired and making enough money to eat because with that
mindset you aren’t living you’re just existing.
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