lesson learned

originally written on March 11, 2009

As I was making my portfolio both in a pdf format and online, lots of thoughts came to me about how I should communicate my work-concept, thought process, rationale, and the final piece itself. For the most part, it was enough to have a blurb that described what the project was about and some static images of the final piece; especially for print-based design, it worked totally fine. But when it comes to interactive/time-based pieces or the ones for which the concept and process are important to show, I had a hard time coming up with a good way to present them. Because they need clear communication so that whoever views my work can understand what they are all about without me walking through them. On top of that, technical issues also added to the difficulties I had. For the information design project I did in flash or the mobile application I designed with two other people, the final presentations would only be useful when I navigate through them myself following a specific scenario since I was not able to build a fully-working prototype by no means. In other words, after all the hard work I did, it’s almost useless to be used in my portfolio. In order to work around that problem, for the project I’ve just finished, I designed the final presentation such that it’s almost self-explanatory which I think turned out pretty nicely. Knowing that I was going to have it in my portfolio made it easier for me to craft it the way I did. From all these trials and errors, I realized the best way to communicate my design is to have it speak for itself to the point where some parts of the presentation seem to be almost redundant and then to trim it down so that I won’t come across as literally reading from or repeating what’s on the slide. Although frustrating at times, it was an experience that paid off. As a ‘communication’ designer, what would be more shameful than being unable to communicate my own ideas…?