In my experience, portfolios are one of the hardest things to put together.
When you’re really creative and are just bursting with ideas – you have no time.
When you’ve got loads of time – you can’t come up with any ideas.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a designer, developer, copywriter – whatever, creating a portfolio is rarely easy.
Learn in public
I recently saw a video about why we should all Learn in Public:
It’s an idea I’d also been reading about in Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.
At its simplest, the idea suggests that we should all share smaller bits of our work daily, rather than trying to wait until we have something ‘worth’ showing.
Frontend Folio is my attempt at just that, documenting the process of learning new skills and using them to bring together a frontend development portfolio.
What do you want to learn?
At the time of writing this, I’ve had 8+ years of web design & development experience across a number of different industries.
I’m now working as a UX Designer – not as a developer, and I’m getting rusty.
This puts me in a similar position as beginner developers in that I’m not doing anything at work that I can use to build a portfolio.
Or am I….?
Part of my role involves performing heuristic reviews on websites, and a lot of the time A11y (Accessibility) issues are the most common problems that I find.
After a few of these reviews, my interest was well and truly piqued by the A11y issues that I kept on seeing across more and more websites.
So my UX work has actually provided an area for me to explore, in an effort to go beyond my role and understand some more of the solutions to the problems that I find.
Now to figure out how to start.