I was working on my website comps today and decided to use my old style on this website on one of the designs, but with a much more minimal use of colors and texture.  I like the style and after reading "Building Design Portfolios," I realized that the style can always be updated later.  I also thought about the audience further.  I am not actually designing for small business owners…I’m just trying to get hired by a design firm and noticed.  I’ve gotten work already with my current portfolio anyway so I don’t think the textured style is keeping people away.  Plus I already have a web design job lined up for myself upon graduation at a design firm, so if I don’t find better offers, I have that to fall back on.

Also when reading the book, I found lots of cool information on other types of portfolios like physical books and things.  It is apparently always good to have a print version with you and this makes perfect sense to me.  What if your website is down?  The person can always look at high quality prints in your design book or on a computer in the form of PDFs.  I think I want to put together a PDF version and a printed version in one of those spiffy metal binders.  Aluminum binder just seems to go hand in hand with a web designer.  It looks kinda like a macbook pro.

I also experimented with another graphic style on one of my other website comps.  This was more of a flat color style with some pixel patterns in it.  It looked pretty cool, but I’m definitely not feeling it as much as my other design.  The last one, I want to try to do some kind of style with very few colors.  VERY minimal.  Something I haven’t done before.

This week in "Designing a Digital Portfolio," it talked about how to integrate 3D and other types of work into your portfolio as 2D images.  It went over the various methods of converting to best quality…but my work doesn’t really apply to this.  I have a few photographs, but I’m not trying to market myself as a photographer and I don’t have that many really good shots anyway.  The main stuff in my portfolio is exclusively digital, either a digital photo alteration or a digital website.  I shouldn’t have a problem with image quality, because a screen shot is a screen shot.

While out doing research for my web design comps, I came across a pretty decent article on Smashing Magazine about how to create a successful design portfolio.  I think it is worth reading for anyone making one at the moment.  Smashing Magazine is a great source for design related articles (especially web) and I frequent it daily.