This website and my architecture portfolio were recently published as case studies in the newly released Designing a Digital Portfolio, Second Edition by Cynthia L. Baron.
There’s something great about being able to hold a physical object, and feel that tangible quality of a book which is so fundamentally different from a webpage. But as information jumps mediums it also often loses its dynamic qualities in becoming a static image with no frame of reference. But I think that’s what I like most about this book, the way it handles the appropriateness of online content in a printed medium. It’s less of a simple showcase of graphic design, like those ubiquitous, curatorial lists of 1-pixel deep images that dominate the internet (see Smashing Magazine lists, FFFFound, and everything else in my google reader). A book’s permanence is so contrary to the ephemeral nature of online content that a bound book of pretty images is just unnecessary, but here, in Baron’s book, the work is presented more from an analytical position that goes deeper and studies the underlying strategies and navigational framework of this website and the tangled web of connections as well as a broader overview of techniques for presenting an online portfolio. That, and, I’m all for anything that begins with the line: “Locke’s creativity is not debatable.”

See more images below:

Final portfolio from my time at Columbia University’s GSAPP. “Arguments” seemed like an apropos title after the discussion provoked during my final final review. And, yeah, I always default to that yellow.

GracefulSpoon Version1.0 was mainly a static repository for my undergraduate portfolio and eventually led to this printed version. It’s funny to look back on something that became such a major time investment, something that is supposed to sum up all my design sensibilities, and even, in no small measure, played a major role in determining the outcome of my immediate future. And then, after months of anticipation, the portfolio fulfills its purpose – successfully! – and is no longer relevant. So, in lieu of a fiery burial at sea, I hope a modest blog post isn’t too anticlimactic.

Click here to view the full portfolio.

By popular demand, I added a link to lulu if you’d like to order a high-quality, printed version.