Portfolio - Tumblr Posts - Page 2

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Check out my 2018 MICA Competitive Scholarship Portfolio on Behance!

The biggest challenge I have when looking at portfolio websites is that oftentimes, the user experience is poor because of the amount of focus the designer has put into the user interface. I can appreciate a flashy website with a lot of moving pieces but I don’t think that there’s a place for them on a portfolio website unless it’s serving a purpose. For example, it might make sense for someone whose career is in uiux to show off what they can do, but something that’s been drilled into me as a design student is the concept of function over form.

When looking for a portfolio website that inspired me, I found that I leaned towards websites that used grids, that had a definite branded look (colour, style, etc) and that was easy to navigate.

Kate Moross is a bit of a hero of mine. (Kate goes by they/them) They’re a fantastic designer that has been in the business for over a decade and is based out of London. Their work is vibrant, stylized and unique. 

Their website neatly links to each piece and gives many examples of it in different lighting and with great photography. They lay out their involvement in the project in most cases and Kate’s site seems to update each year.

I really like the way Kate’s site is laid out because while they utilize a grid, it has a couple of quirks to it which stays true to their nature as a designer. Kate isn’t afraid to be themself on their own website and I think that’s important, as it was discussed in class, it’s vital to represent yourself truthfully.

I also really like how easy it is to navigate Kate’s website.

The sidebar is bright and easy to find and it pretty much takes you anywhere you might think to go. Kate also has an extensive background though with a lot more experience than I’ve had. They’re well known worldwide and even if you think you’ve never seen their stuff, you most likely have. While my portfolio will be smaller to start, I think a simple layout like this would be easier to keep building up.

Summary of takeaways for my own portfolio site:

Keep it simple, only use flashy stuff if it’s necessary. As a designer, I tend to lean towards a minimalistic approach so my website should reflect that.

Be honest. Don’t use language that you don’t mean when referring to yourself. 

Give users the information that they’re seeking with minimal effort. 

Try to use excellent photography and avoid unedited/poor quality imagery for the website. Reshoot if you have the time or use mockups for now. 

Explain what you did for each project so that people can understand what they’re looking at and why.

We were asked to think about where we’d be in 5-10 years and what we’d like to be doing. This is a good tool for portfolio work because it can help guide what you want others to get out of it.

My Vision:

I want to be changing the world in a positive way through design.

Steps:

Work full time at Common Foundry and develop my design skills.

Create work for clients and passion projects for myself that is effective.

Involve myself in the community and take initiative.

Create every single day and travel often, meet new people, learn, grow, adapt and problem solve as best I can. 

Portfolio Website

The Links I’ll Use

about me, small joys, resumé

Which 3 (or more) projects will you showcase on your site?

Balanced Balanced is a project that I did last semester where we had to choose an issue and then try and solve it as best we could through graphic design. Balanced ended up being an integrative system to promote a healthy work/life balance for the issue. It showcases an app design, web page, smart watch, smart speaker and welcome pamphlet as well as a colour brand.

The Nav The Nav Student Press is a magazine that I have been art directing the past two years and worked on for the last three. It showcases my editorial skills and features two different base designs for me to show on my website.

Place Place is a branding project that I am currently working on for design for business. At the end of this project I will have a fully branded guide for a new business. This will include a logo, a pattern, style guide and branding elements. I will add it at the end of the term.

Fox & Koi Fox & Koi is the enamel pin business that I run with Teigan Mudle. Through fox & koi, we have designed over 30 pins and I have personally been responsible for 15 of them and collaborated on 5. I have also done some illustrative print work, designed backing cards and created stickers.

Where do you need to fill holes in your showcase?

photography

mockups

sketches/roughs for all projects

more active dribble, design instagram

What will you do specifically to fill holes?

write rationals

do photography of products and/or mockups

post more on my design instagram

post more on dribbble

organize past sketches and roughs into something legible.

What platform will you use?

Wordpress, powered by semplice

What is your domain name?

saraholmes.design

Brand Statement

Hi, my name is Sara. I am a graphic design graduate. When I’m not designing, I’m running my small enamel pin business or slinging coffee at White rabbit Coffee Co. No matter what the task, I put my all into it with gusto. I work bright and fast. I want to create real, positive change through my work, no matter how small. 

Brand Promise

I’ll always do better than before. (WIP)

Pushing the limits on every project. (possibility?)

Rough Rationales Blog Post #5A

Project Title: The Nav

The Challenge:

A new visual identity for an 8 issue annual student magazine that should have a new energy but must be recognizable as The Nav.

Should appeal to and embody the whole student body.

Need to be able to leave the magazine layout to the design team with the confidence that they can do it.

Redesigning my own design from the previous year.

The Approach:

Pull it back and give it a cleaner look from the previous year while still maintaining the personality within.

New set of standards and styles

What I did:

Art director

delegated layout, gave standards and rules

Initial design and layout of mag

coordinated a new printer and rules for mag layout

Notes:

Figure out which Nav to focus on, most likely most recent.

Highlight the leadership role.

Project Title: Balanced

The Challenge:

Overwork is a social stigma that promotes an unhealthy lifestyle.

I wanted to change the way that people thought of overworking and give them tools to change their relationship with work/life balance.

Create something usable that could be integrated easily into a busy lifestyle.

The Approach:

Not trying to be a fix-all but guide the user to make healthier choices by offering an integrated scheduling system. 

An ecosystem that learns about the user through use.

What I did:

I created a web app, mobile app, smart speaker (ish), smart watch ecosystem that could be applied to all aspects of life. 

Ish - an ai that learns about the user through conversation and gives helpful tips on a healthier work/life balance.

Brand identity.

Research.

Art Direction

Notes:

Clarity!

Explain this project to someone who has never seen it outside of class.

Project Title: Fox & Koi

The Challenge:

Last year, I realized that I needed a way to reconnect with my passion for graphic design and push myself to create outside of class work. I’ve always loved enamel pins and so along with a business partner, I began an enamel pin shop.

The Approach:

A pin business is a lot more than just drawing pins, there’s a lot that goes into it including the business side of it, like speaking to manufacturers and suppliers, understanding costs, creating a website and a presence in the online world and community.

What I Did:

I run the business side of fox & koi. I speak to the manufacturers, find new manufacturers, coordinate locations and markets for selling the pins, create the websites, package the pins, do the marketing and I also design pins, stickers and prints.

Notes: 

Put focus on leadership roles.

Explain more about the pin process?

Refined Rationales Blog Post #5B

Project Title: The Nav

The Nav is a unique project because it undergoes a visual identity change yearly. The challenge lies in creating new energy for the student-led press while keeping it recognizable as The Nav but it is also an opportunity to push myself as a design student and push the boundaries. This year I had the task of redesigning my own design from the previous year. The goal was to reign it in and give it a cleaner look from last year while maintaining the distinct personality within. I also needed to make sure that the layout was simple enough that a team of three could ay the 40 page magazine out in one day. 

Project Title: Balanced

Overwork is a worldwide social stigma that promotes an unhealthy lifestyle. Through this project, I wanted to work on a solution for people who lead an unbalanced life by giving them tools to change their relationship with work. The challenge lay in creating something usable that could be integrated easily into a busy lifestyle. I decided to create a scheduling app that would guide users to make healthier choices through education on mental health and forced rests. To this end, I designed a smart ecosystem that learns and adapts to the user through use. 

Project Title: Fox & Koi

Last year, I realized that I needed a way to reconnect with my passion for graphic design and push myself to create outside of classwork. I’ve always loved enamel pins and so along with a business partner, I began an enamel pin shop. There’s a lot that goes into a pin from conception to iteration and the final physical object. Through Fox & Koi I’ve not only worked on my illustration skills but my business skills as well. I run the business side of fox & koi. I speak to the manufacturers, find new manufacturers, coordinate locations and markets for selling the pins, create the websites, package the pins, do the marketing and I also design pins, stickers and prints.

Case Study Draft

Project Title Balanced.

Class Name Design Research Project

Date of Completion 11/29/2019

My Role Art Director

Summary Balanced. is an organization focused on promoting a healthy work/life balance that I designed in the final year of my degree. It is an integrated ecosystem focused on providing a healthier schedule for those that tend to overwork themselves.

Project Challenge

Possible header photo: Waving/animated Ish with the balanced. logo Overwork is dangerous for not only your mental health but your physical health as well. working more than 55 hours a week raises the risk of heart attack and stroke. At this point in time, overworking yourself can officially be a cause of death. Something needs to be done. The challenge lies in ‘What’ and ‘How’? How do we change the way a whole society perceives work/life balance in an appealing way, especially when the target audience is most likely too busy to go through and set up a whole system?

Strategy/Methodology Show pic of Ish

Using myself and my own experiences as a key target audience, I realized that the most important aspect of Balanced. had to be a simple entry point. A simple voice command system in the form of a smart speaker program would be necessary and from there, the rest flowed. The system would be wrapped around the central character of a little AI robot named Ish. 

Ish can be likened to a little assistant that lives inside the user’s phone. It helps plan the user’s day, sends messages to ask how the user is feeling, sends the user on forced breaks and is the face of the Balanced system.

Show Ish screens

Design Process Identification Conceptualization Ideation Show ideation/drafts of Ish Show logo ideation (sketches and final)

brand ideation Production Revision & Feedback Deliverables

Solution/Contribution Show images of the completed booklet, al stages of the ecosystem Balanced has been developed to become a foil that fits snugly around the user’s life. At the beginning of integration, Balanced studies the user’s day to day activities using the deliverables that will be described in the coming pages.

This sounds like a lot, but Balanced knows that not everyone has the time to set a whole system up, so it has been designed with the intention of ease of access. Balanced will bring awareness to the issue of overwork and what it does to an individual’s mental and physical health. It will impact the way that people value their time and themselves as a person and deconstruct the idea that overworking oneself is admirable.

Balanced is an app, a smart speaker, a website, a watch integration, a friend, a secretary and a resource.  Takeaways - This project taught me a lot about the design process from start to finish and also showed me that everything starts from a poor looking sketch but end well depending on the amount of effort and skill you put in.

Unfortunately, I still have a lot to do on my portfolio but I’m not really mad about it. I chose to work with Semplice which is a plugin for WordPress. This meant I had to learn a whole new system! while it’s been a learning curve, I don’t have any regrets. While not very intuitive, it’s a beautiful, clean system. I’m pleased so far with what I have and also feel comfortable taking my time.

Things to do:

design the footer + what I want in it -> eg, contact info?

about page (or just put it on our main page.)

grid layout separate for each page?

photoshoot for new nav once newest issue launches?

More sketches exported for my little joys page

create asset library

reevaluate my case study and redraft. 

remember to keep it minimal and stretch from there.

Portfolio Progress #2

What a time to be alive, a worldwide virus has put most of the world on hold at this time but that doesn’t mean we’re any less busy. We’re finishing this term remotely and it looks like my part-time job will be unavailable for the time being so I guess the silver lining here is more time to work on my portfolio?

Accomplished:

Figured out the Nav bar

Have got a footer going

more pages have been made

a hover feature has been added

project pages are slowly being built

To Do:

nav photoshoot with the latest issue

bilk out project pages

reduce image file sizes

about me page

lightboxes for photography and sketch page

Final Portfolio Response

First of all, here’s my portfolio website!

I’m pretty proud of my portfolio overall. I remember starting this class and not being able to fathom at all how I could self-brand myself. It has been a period of self-reflection these last few months and while i’m glad to be through it, I know it’s never ever. Despite having the base of my website, there are a few things that I’d like to fix.

So learning Semplice has been a trial and a half. If you want my honest review, if you already don’t know how to use wordpress and you on’t have time to learn a whole new system, do not choose semplice for your first go. Just be a friend to yourself and choose a squarespace or wix template and then try semplice later. I’m saving you a lot of pain by saying this. Still, I’m glad I’ve put in the work and I vaguely get it now.

That being said, there’s some weird spacing that I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to deal with. Semplice prides itself on how easy it is to edit but unless you already know how to use it, it’s really not. So I guess I’m going to figure out how to deal with the big gap between the footer and my information in my about page somehow. 

Otherwise all I really want to do is update some of my images in my project pages. For example, my balanced. project page could use a mockup of the booklet or a shoot of the booklet. I’ll try to get that when the print shop opens again. 

I’d also like to eventually add light boxes to my photography and illustrations page. 

Other than those items, I’m pleased with it.

[“Porter’s Gate Lodge - Charleston, SC” // Soleil Mobley 2022]

Here are some high quality pictures of my watercolor painting of the Porter’s Gate Lodge. It is where I would be walking through when I graduate, but ever since COVID yoinked my high school graduation in 2020, I just don’t have a lot of attachment to the ritual of the walk. I included two different kinds of lighting to show how it can change depending on the time of day if one was to display one of my pieces.

This is also an informal announcement that I’m opening commissions for… anything. If you need something made, I gotchu. Paintings, drawings, digital illustrations. Papier-mâché shark wall hangings. Home portraits. Anything! Hmu and we can talk about prices.

[“Polar bear living in an abandoned weather station on Kolyuchin Island, Russia” // Soleil Mobley 2022]

I want to give a big thanks to Dmitry Kokh for taking the reference pictures I used for this piece. I love seeing animals reclaiming places we used to utilize yet have now abandoned.

Message me if you want to discuss commissions!

"Becareful of the Murdock boys. They've got the devil in 'em."

The Silent Princess

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All done in colored pencil

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