Choosing Medium As a Portfolio Platform
Portfolio and portfolio upkeep can be the bane of the design or creative professional’s existence. Work looks stale in a hurry, dreams of blogging weekly fall off, and trends shift and change so rapidly that even a ‘top of the line’ portfolio design can reflect poorly months later. And this holds mostly true for all designers. But for experience designers, we often don’t even have exciting visuals to show, our work often looks boring or dated the second it’s done because it’s a sketch, or a spreadsheet, or writing on a whiteboard. With all that in mind I decided to rethink my own portfolio a few months back.
What Do I Offer and Who Do I Offer It To?
This question was at the core of my new redesign; what is it that I want to show and who do I want to show it to? It’s been a long time since I was trying to grow a following on Dribbble (with side work as an illustrator no less) and trying to showcase work that was elegant and worthy because of its aesthetics, more than the results, was at odds with my feelings about the purpose of design. I knew my next portfolio needed to explore context and process far more than showcasing images of work absent its meaning. I also wanted this new portfolio to offer an exceptional reading experience, as the importance of posting ideas, thoughts, and processes has become greater as I’ve developed as a designer and instructor.
So I set off to fight windmills and wear wash buckets, spending far too many hours looking at the portfolios of folks I respected, people mentioned frequently in ‘best of’ lists, and tinkering with platforms and services I wasn’t all that keen on. I conscripted talented friends, I sketched and sketched and wireframed and sketched, and then fretted constantly that the ideas weren’t enough. All the while, the backlog of article and blogs ideas grew, work grew older and less relevant, and I wasn’t doing much to move forward. Killing it.
Then On the Horizon…
Of course I knew about Medium. Medium articles comprised half of my saved articles on Pocket and several dozen choice entries in my Raindrop bookmarks. But I’d never considered the platform as a good idea for a portfolio until I found myself frequenting a few publications more often. Medium’s great strength, in my opinion, is presenting the content legibly and consistently for all sorts of writing, and the more I dug into publications, the more the idea appealed to me. Using Medium as a platform for my content would allow me to quickly ‘spin up’ new ideas, articles, or work without having to worry about plugins to update, frequent backups, frequent spam and brute force attacks, or, and this was very important to me, focusing more on the visual presentation of work than telling the story behind it.
And so here I am, saying goodbye to the Wordpress theme Fat&Handsome, and hello to the new publication Fat&Handsome. It should allow me to make wireframes, empathy maps, and user journeys significantly more appealing and easy on the eyes than previous portfolios, and, I hope, a little easier for a visitor to make it through a longer story.
