This is a collection of digital work that I've created that I feel is worth displaying in an official digital portfolio. It includes some of my past works, as I wanted to collect them all into one space, where the other works on my homepage are to let you experience my journey through design education the same way I did. These differ from those works in that these are examples of places where I felt I grasped why something worked, rather than just happening upon it. My time here at Winona State has really been a lot of those experiences—that is, learning the theory behind design, rather than the literal skill of design.
Two main experiences that I'm pleased with are my main page—HinterDesign.com—and the Cafe Oscar page. The reason I enjoy those two the most are due to the fact that they were almost all my own creativity. In the case of HinterDesign.com, there was a base template, but the only thing left of that template is really the spacing of the landing/main header and the greyscale color of the main background image. The icons, type, and layout were all my own decision. Addtionally, the mountain road background behind the works section is my own creation using Photoshop paint tools.. Cafe Oscar is another work that I'm pleased with, due to the way the project was set up. It was laid out to us very similiary to a live-project—we had our client, the professor, we had various deadlines to meet, we had to go back and forth on color, layout, imagery, etc. The entire class was working solo, and after every deadline our "client" chose a concept to move forward with, which is where we all started. The final products were all solo works, so whatever we ended up with was almost all our own interpretation of the decisions made.
This is the result of a very similar project as the Cafe Oscar designs, except this was a genuine live project. We came up with a Creative Brief for the client (the school), and together we decided on designs, layouts, colors, etc. We then had to come up with designs for a legitimate campaign that will eventually be ran on the campus. One of the assets of the project we had to create was an animated logo for digital displays and advertisements. I was in charge of taking the static logo (designed mostly in part by my colleagues) and turning into a moving logo. This turned out really well considering how basic it was in my first drafts, and I'm proud to have it in my collection. I also animated the I-Design logo seen at the top of the screen as a small project for a class, but neither the project or result were worthy of a full spot on display.
While not officially intended for my design application review, I figured including any quality work on this site is worth doing for future references. This project was to take an already-good WordPress template, and create something better out of it. In order to achieve the design I wanted, I had to use my existing knowledge in HTML/CSS to customize the template. I had to take the empty objects in the template and create my own objects for nearly every major chunk of this page. I'm incredibly proud of how it turned out, and am happy to include it in my portfolio. For the context of my design application, I am not including it as it was largely based on knew learning, rather than things I learned in my first two years of collegiate education.
