Portfolio and the Blog
I was about to delete my Medium account. I cancelled my membership, built a blog on Wordpress, and opened my Medium profile to start copy/pasting stories to my new personal website.
Why?
- I wanted a clean slate
- I’m a better designer than when I built my old portfolio
- I took a break from writing anything “portfolio” while I was working full time instead of working for myself
- I took one look at my old website and said, “someone hired me after looking at this website!?!?!?!”
Why?
- Imposter syndrome
- Comfort of receiving a steady paycheck
- Less of a need to prove myself to the internet
- Forgetting my growth mindset
So I did what anyone red-blooded and self-conscious designer would do: I stared at a blank edit page titled “Portfolio” in an H1 text box and said, “I can’t keep any of this. I’m starting over.”
But then something clicked:
If I’m a better designer than I was when I wrote these stories, I can prove it. I can demonstrate it.
A portfolio is a thumbnail of your design point of view. My Medium stories do this. I just need more of it. How many projects aren’t represented here? There’s clearly something here that UX Collective asked to include my writing in their Bootcamp publication.
No reason to lose that history. That history ‘in which I can make followers part of my journey,’ as Martijn van den Broeck says in his Medium article, Why your next Design Portfolio should be a Blog. He continues “a journey in which you struggle, a journey in which you learn, a journey in which you show the unpolished version of yourself.”
I happen to like that unpolished version of myself … well … until I read it years later and cringe.
For example, I spent all this time on a new Wordpress website only for Wordpress to put this stupid widget in the bottom of my home page:
So come be part of my journey, if you’d like. We will probably learn something together!
