Week 11 - Designing a portfolio interface

Wow! I can't believe that there is only 3 weeks left until everything is due. So as I'm getting close to the end, and of course so is the end of the last book for this class: Designing Digital Portfolios. In chapter 11 they discussed about the importance of interface. These sentences caught my attention because not only are we almost done, but in this field we can never stop learning: "Interface design is a specialized discipline that is still changing rapidly... To build an exceptional interface,you must study user interaction, have a special talent for organizing data, and be a good visualizer." In order to have a working interface it is recommended to organize yourself and by that it was summed up in four stages: Group, Map, Schematic, and Look-and-feel.

Group, is knowing what category to put your projects in it could be by date, area of design, illustrations or photos, print, interactive, 2D, 3D, Process like sketches, modeling, character animations, by client, the difficulty of the project or by visual interest the viewer will navigate through. Map, is what you come up with afterwards to organize, it's a flowchart that represents every page in your portfolio. Schematic, is is basically a page layout grid. Look and feel, is think about what style or theme will be use and how people will interact with those decisions. Once all of this is thought of and re-thought and you are happy with the outcome it is important to stay focused and avoid distractions, This book suggested to remember KISS: Keep It Simple, Seriously. Although I know that I have seen this acronym of kiss as, Keep it Simple Stupid.
The most time consuming step is preparation although building also requires time it makes it much easier to accomplish this by having everything already well thought out and then have a working interface.