Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Digital Portfolios and Me.

A freelancer we use at work has her entire portfolio loaded on her iPad. Lord was I jealous when I first heard of it. First I was jealous of her iPad. Then I was jealous of her cunning use of it for actual professional development. I like the idea of always having a dynamic portfolio with me. If I were to meet with a client and needed show (the limited) multi-media design work I've accomplished so far, surely having it saved on a tablet device is much more interesting then just reviewing my own (current lack of a) website. But how do I accomplish this? Besides the obvious problem of not being able to afford an iPad, how do I make something more interesting then just a quick flip through a PDF?

Enter the awesomeness of InDesign's interactive PDF and SWF capibilities. I've starting taking Interactive Documents on Lynda.com and have found it daunting and addictive. I love it all! Buttons, actions, lite Flash, and borrowed Action Script files can potentially take my teaching guide examples into new heights of interesting showmanship. I think the most helpful way of organizing all my pieces will be to utilizing multi-state objects. Pages within a documents with a built in slide show? Yes please! Now to actually build the thing...and get it to live somewhere.

As to what I'm going to put all this on for one on one interviews remains semi-unclear. I think I'd be best to have it as a micro-site, then also as a downloadable PDF for anyone who wants it. Hell I don't care if you have examples of my work, download it all! Reference me to your friends, spread the word on my interactive document awesomeness. Now does it live on its own, here...Tumblr? Well, it's not a perfectly thought out plan, but it's a nice start of a cool idea. Hopefully I can use this to watch it grow.

Oh, and if I have to purchase a Nook Color ($270 y'all!) because it has Flash capabilities and might just be handy to whip out for a quick demonstration, well so be it. Worst comes to worst I can get library books on my poor man's iPad (aka digital portfolio) now.

How awesome is all that?

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