Seeing through web works & archived projects
Electronest website has 2 new pages: a selected web works list and an archive. This post is about self representation.
Electronest now has grown with 2 new pages:
Web Work Selection - a concise selection of our work on the web
Projects Archive - an attempt at exhaustive list of the projects we worked on; 88 so far are listed, which makes a rough 22 per year - not too bad.
Quite often, I feel stuck with the idea of presenting my work; most of the time the ideal portfolio ends up being a text, sometimes quite a long one, which is not an good form to showcase your work to a large and possibly mainstream audience. Sometimes, also, it ends up being a collection of images, which our web work is not either. Both have practical advantage - disadvantages also.
Thanks to the repeated inputs from Pierre on the subject, this weekend I finally gave a go at something Pierre referred to as ‘See-Through Website’ - which simply means there’s a kind of a hole in the web page where the original website and content is displayed (for more technical insights see the post on Capacity: Electronest Projects and see through pages). The main advantage of this kind of solution being the concise way of displaying list of links, not relying on an external outfit but presenting the Truth - the website we worked on for what it is: not a beautiful photoshoped image but a web page. A communication machine on which you click, which reacts to your input, which is resized with your browser window, etc. A real web page.
Direct citation instead of a partial representation is quite interesting way of exploring the notion of a portfolio, especially for a web portfolio.
Beyond the usefulness of having a portfolio, working on the presentation of one self’s work is quite hard; some creative may decided to ask others to manage this quite particular task of self promotion (which is not self in this case) like recently when we worked for wearebuild.com (with The Digital Club) or when we designed a custom blog for Martino Gamper work. It is quite hard but at the same time it helps a lot to figure out what kind of projects brings you where you’re (the From) and where you would like to go, also it gave me a sort of an overview on what are the working process, the methods we used and which worked or not, where to bring some more efforts and also what we are good at and where did we fail. It helps a lot to define new paths, new direction to take.
Working on how to describe and explain our activities definitely helps me a lot to define and redefine our activities and stay fresh with it.