People have been paying me to design things for over a decade now. During the first few years of this adventure, I visited clients with my printed portfolio in hand, my book, as the people in advertising would call it. As design work diversified beyond print, and computers and the internet became ubiquitous in every home and office, I stopped carrying around that little folder of designs. A digital portfolio was the way forward, not because it was the cool new thing to do, but because it simply made more sense.

As the artist’s and designer’s portfolio of work has moved into the digital realm, there has also been an on going evolution of what a portfolio needs to be and do. With the variety of technology, structure and style at your disposal, creating a digital showcase of your work is not as straight forward as sticking a few sheets into a folder any more. But, what we might have lost in simplicity we have gained in convenience and capability, so here is an overview of digital portfolios for you, the creative animal.

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Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a brash, old-fashioned fantasy adventure, with a subtle heart. Having chosen to take the original adventures of Alice forward into new territory, Burton has preserved the essence of a classic while also creating fresh facets for a wider audience to enjoy.

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Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes is a fun, action-packed frolic through the gritty chaos of Victorian London, with a frantic pace and a fabulous sense of humour. Whether by design or by coincidence, by breaking away from the conventions of previous outings, Ritche has created the definitive on-screen version of the world’s most famous fictional detective.

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I don’t remember the first time I heard the name Sherlock Holmes. There has to have been a first time. Maybe someone mentioned it, or perhaps I picked it up in a movie or a comic book. The details of our first encounter remain shrouded in the mists of my early childhood memory. But, however it is that I got to know of the illustrious detective, I do know that at some point I read a small story in school about the doctor who Arthur Conan Doyle used as inspiration for his creation. It was that description of the mental prowess of a Doctor Joseph Bell that made me want to read about Holmes.

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Chance Pe Dance is a Hindi movie by director Ken Ghosh, starring Shahid Kapur and Genelia D’Souza. It’s the story of a struggling actor in the Mumbai film industry, and the people he meets on his journey. If you saw last year’s Luck By Chance, you’d be forgiven for thinking this will be more of the same, but it managed to surprise me on several levels, and left me smiling.

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When you visit an un-familiar place, and that too on a tight schedule, you try to pack in as much as is possible into the time you have. This means hitting the spots you’re interested in seeing, and darting between them as fast as you can, while sqeezing in the necessities of sleep and food. What ends up happening is that your memories of your trip are reduced to the big events and all else is forgotten due to the information overload. But every experience is made up as much, if not more, of the little bits that hold it together, as it is made up of the large dramatic events. Having written about all the big stories on my trip to Bangalore, I thought it was time to finish with some of the little bits that come to mind.

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After our day at Nandi Hills and a bit of driving around Bangalore, we thought we were done. Set to leave the following afternoon, we had little to do on the one Sunday morning that remained, besides relax, spend some time with the family, and say our goodbyes. The evening before, we were sitting around the house talking to our cousin, discussing such important world issues as camera equipment, when he mentioned that he was going rock-climbing in the morning. He said his favourite spot was close by, it was a nice bit of wilderness, a decent place to take some photos, and that there are usually plenty of birds to spot. With our trips to Mahim Nature Park and Borivali National Park on the previous two Sundays, we were now on a hat-trick of Sundays spent in nature. It seemed a shame to break a good streak, so plans were made for everyone to take one last sojourn in Bangalore to a little hill in Turhalli.

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