DESIGN PORTFOLIO

I have been perusing Rin Macritchie’s design portfolio. It is clear that she is a creative and critical writer, meaning that her portfolio is inherently artistic and informative. I find the layout of the blog to be effective because it encourages the exploratory navigation of the information being presented. I think this portfolio engages well with Kress’s gestural mode of meaning because she has designed with kinesthetics and texture in mind; while it is obvious you can’t touch it, she has relied on the words on the page, the background images, and the many links to give the impression that the site is to be interacted with intimately.

Additionally, I think that Rin’s design portfolio understands the positionality of art and criticism, as well as the privilege to be presented in a scholarly manner. This is to say that I think Rin wasn’t attempting to detach from the work, which is so often creatively and personally driven, which allows her to present the work in a way that is cognizant of her position as an artist and scholar. Lawson says that “designers being human beings find it hard to remain either dispassionate or detached about their work”, but this design portfolio allows humanity to burst through the language and design unpretentiously.

I think that this portfolio could have leaned more in Kress’s idea of images being important for multimodal presentation and design. While textural, I feel like adding images to the work might have added an extra layer to break up the wordiness. The design of this portfolio is heavy on the language, which means it is linguistically effective, but not as much visually.

As a creative writer myself, I think I will make sure to add separate pages for the different genres of work like Rin did. Furthermore, I like that she utilized PDFs of the work through a link, which allows the work to maintain its form best; I think that creating posts with blurbs about the assignment and then adding a PDF link will allow for effective exploratory engagement with the work. I also adore the cohesiveness of the color scheme, backgrounds, and navigation of the site and will make sure to keep the same aesthetic throughout my portfolio (even if it might be more severe and high contrast than Rin’s). Making sure the language and the design elements coalesce will be tantamount to the effectiveness of my portfolio and I will have to pay extra attention to this.