IDD 480- Organization

Chapter 5 of Designing a Digital Portfolio is all about organizing. “Good portfolios are not created the night before you present them. You need to look at your entire body of work to evaluate its condition and current relevance. And that’s had to do when it’s scattered on multiple disks, file folders, and flat files (83).”

Everyone has their own version for organizing. My version is very random, just like myself. You look at my room and you would think I lacked the term organizing in my vocabulary. On the contrary, I know where almost (key word: almost) everything is. My computers on the other hand are much more organized. Every genre of music has their own folder. Pictures are categorized by date and IDD has its own folders according to class. Without the folders or any organizing of documents I’m pretty sure I would be lost. Even my buddy list for AIM is organized in to at least 10 different categories. Just as the rest of my life is (semi) organized, my portfolio needs to be organized. Not only in a way that I would understand it but organized in a way that someone else would be able to navigate around the site or other medium.

This will be the first website that will actually be full of information and may need more than just one page per topic. Many variables will come into play to help with the navigation system. The navigation system will be key in helping to organize the site. Without a form of navigation, organizing would be impossible.

Just as organizing is important, so is the media on which something is presented. Technology over the past ten years has increased and changed time and time again. Technology is forever changing. Since starting IDD, I have used three different versions of Photoshop. In Careers by Design, Roz Goldfarb points out just that fact, “Whenever one software, device, platform, or protocol becomes established you can be sure an improvised version is moments behind (85).”

Just as the software is always updating, its important to keep the portfolio up-to-date. Having everything under the sun isn’t always a good idea, whereas having the best and most recent pieces of work may be better. Organization is key when figuring out which pieces to put into a portfolio.