So this week, I was supposed to come up with a better self promotion idea.  I only came up with 2…which are almost the same thing. I think it is VERY hard to promote yourself well, especially if you are just starting out with little work to choose from.  I am a web designer and choosing something that can effectively promote my work seems to be a difficult task.  I decided to try making tiny moo cards (shown to us by our professor) each being a real world thumbnail image of a website I made.  I chose a thumbnail because of what my professor said to me; "you don’t want to give away the whole thing."  And on the back, I will have basic information and my web address so they can see the rest of the web page in full view.  I will also purchase tiny cases designed to hold the moo cards to give it a very cute and most importantly, un-tossable look.  They’ll likely save it and see it a few months or years later and give me another look, opening the door for more opportunities.

Other projects for this week I had been working on are the secondary portfolio I am making.  I have a very set idea of what I want so hopefully it survives critique.  I just want to do something very simple, like what I saw in a number of other student portfolios that were in class.  I want to have a metal binder with large see-through folder sleeves and print out my website screen shots in high resolution to put in there.  Each page would have a small description, name and url so people can read it while I’m making a presentation.  I would also like to show a number of different pages for each website.  I was looking through this weeks reading in "building design portfolios" and I happen to come across the exact type of binder I wanted!  Amazing.  It was the one used by stoltze designs.  Their layouts seemed pretty cool too.  Especially for me.  Some of the other portfolios were pretty awesome too.  I have to go and take a look in an art store soon for one and get cracking.

My website construction is going well too.  I am experimenting with a number of new techniques for this website, so it was initially hard to slice up my design.  I had to think for a while before I figured out exactly how to create my repeatable background patterns.  In the end though, it paid off and my total file size is very small for the whole site.  It totalled in at about 25 KB of images for the layout.  Pretty small sompared to other sites I have done at my job.

I also tried my hand at writing a cover letter.  This was a lot tougher than I thought because I had NEVER written one before.  I looked around the internet for a while to see examples of designer cover letters and got a hold of what I was supposed to write.  Hopefully it is OK.

Besides writing my cover letter, I have to start analyzing my text I write for each project on my webpage and print portfolio.  I have already written a bunch of short descriptions for many of my websites on my old portfolio site, but now I should go back and look it over again with things in mind I read about in "designing a digital portfolio."  Keeping things simple is what you should do.  Make sure grammar and spelling is perfect.  Don’t write too much.  I think I have this covered…but it doesn’t hurt to go back and check again.

I also found this video on youtube which I think any designer would find pretty darn funny : ]