Professional Portfolio
A major project for my Technology for Information Professionals class was building a professional portfolio using CSS and HTML… from scratch. I ended up going to town even though I was constantly confused and unsure I was organizing things correctly, which meant some nights I was up until 4am frantically editing code and checking to see if it looked right when published. It ends up serving an important purpose, as in past iterations of this website, I’ve had trouble deciding whether to add in projects that I’ve worked on professionally that have loose ties to my art practice, but aren’t really what people would come to my website for. And vice versa, a potential employer wouldn’t really be interested in my art portfolio just for the few projects hidden throughout that might be relevant to a non-art career.
Here is the link to the portfolio: http://web.simmons.edu/~dunscomb/lis488/index.html
I ended up separating the portfolio into three parent categories: Library & Information Science, Marketing & Design, and Art Practice. The LIS page gives an overview of my training thus far and career change decision. Marketing & Design covers such projects that I’ve worked on in various not-overtly-creative roles; the random assortment is what had made shoehorning them all into my art website so tricky in the past (Print Advertising; Greetings & Promos; Book Recommendations; Design; Location & Staff Photography; Corporate Event Photography). The Art Practice page features a smattering of paintings and drawings to introduce a prospective employer to what I do outside of work without the expectation that they click into a separate website. I also link to my resume and this portfolio.
Design-wise, I tried to mirror the style of this website, in terms of the neutral color palette, navigation structure, layout, and soft edges. It was cool to have a design target in mind while I worked, but it was also eye-opening as I tried to manually create designs that I can so absentmindedly select on Squarespace and take for granted. I’ve definitely valued the guardrails of a website design platform since finishing, since they will inevitably prevent serious errors throwing the entire website out of whack. Though on the other hand, I have occasionally been annoyed that it’s not as easy to 100% customize a Squarespace website (unless you have an expensive corporate account that allows boundless custom CSS, like a design sheet).
I don’t know that website design is for me as a career, but it’s good to have some experience under my belt if I ever need to build something from scratch in the future.
Anyway, I’m one year into my grad school program, which means hopefully a year from now I will have a masters in LIS! Next semester I’ll be taking classes in Collections & Materials for Young Adults, Modern Publishing & Libraries, and Art Documentation. Simmons allows students to design their own curriculum if they like (aside from a few requirements), so I’m trying to branch out into all of my interests! I’m also hoping to take a class in archives in my final semester as well, on top of some recommended courses for public librarianship. My goal for next semester is to continue working on time management, try not to stress out about grades too much, and attain some industry knowledge that could also be applied to my (so far) timid sharing of my own book project.
