Creating a portfolio.. or not

20/01/12 11:27

It’s pretty easy to make a portfolio when you’re working as an individual, or you’re just adding lab work, or you do a lot of freelancing stuff on the side. It’s also a lot easier to make that portfolio when you’re skilled in the art of the pretties – because you can just bung ‘em up on the internet for people to “ooh” and “aah” at.

But what happens when you join a company that works as a unit to create a website? What happens if you’re a developer, or a software developer, and you can’t say “look at this” because people won’t “get” it?

That’s what I’m facing at the moment. I’ve done a fair amount of work on several websites in the last few months while I’ve been working with Circle. I’ve created a custom module, but it’s on our intranet. I’ve rethemed several sites, but I’ve just done the coding and not the design. Can I put that in a portfolio? Someone else did the design, someone else did the content, I just put it all together.

How do you go about building that sort of portfolio? How can you showcase your talents if you’re just a part of a team? (Not to say “just” a part of a team, mind: I mean a part of a team as opposed to working on your own.)

Maybe I’ll just take screenshots of the pages and the code and see where that gets me. What do you guys do?

Filed under: The Girl, Web Design by Sophie

http://jegtnes.com mr. Jegtnes

When I update my portfolio this weekend I’ll be adding some dev work I did for Santa Cruz Europe and FreestyleXtreme. It’s tricky, but I’ll briefly explain what I did, including tools and frameworks used, include screenshots if it’s front-end work, and link to it if it’s publicly available. That’s all I can do, really, I think.

http://herbal-jazz.net Sophie

See, that’s what I think I’ll do – just a quick description of what I did and how. It’s just frustrating that for some sites I won’t have much to show for the work I put in.

http://www.tyrant-designs.com Shelley

I generally just write what it was I actually did; if I can get a screenshot that’s great, even if it’s just of the site itself but then just write about the bits you did to contribute to getting it to that stage.

http://herbal-jazz.net Sophie

Yeah, I think that’s going to be what I’ll do – but only for the larger bits and pieces, of course! No point in taking a whole screenshot and doing a full writeup for a single line of code, hehe.