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The presentation at my college was done on Sunday. I would say it went well, though not quite an outright and complete success. I get the feeling I might have overestimated the level of interest amongst final year university students for this subject matter, and also their level of understanding of basic internet technologies. Perhaps that is a geek affliction.

I do hope it was piqued their curiosity, at least. It certainly resulted in some more thinking on the subject of online portfolios in particular, and some of the trials and tribulations involved. So much so that there was the realisation amongst the group that they had no idea where to begin with building a website, and I might be going in next week to conduct a workshop on creating a simple website from scratch. One seemingly insurmountable task at a time.

While I will write up the contents of the entire presentation as an article here some time soon, I did promise my stressed out, soon to be graduating, audience that I would post links to some of the resources and software I mentioned (I didn’t have the time to prepare a handout before the event, unfortunately), so here they are:

Portfolio PDF Tools

PDFCreator
http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator

OpenOffice.org
http://www.openoffice.org

Scribus
http://www.scribus.net

Portfolio Website Tools

KompoZer
http://www.kompozer.net

WordPress
http://www.wordpress.org

Samir

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I have been invited to give a presentation — a presentation on digital portfolios to be precise. Dr. John Alexander Smith (with whom I’ve worked before), of the Interior Design department at my old college asked me if I would be interested in talking to a class of final year undergraduates on the subject of electronic portfolios and personal websites. Rarely the one to back down from a chance to scare myself to death with seemingly insurmountable tasks, I said yes.

I haven’t given a formal presentation to a group of people in a while. In more recent years, as a freelance designer, I’ve often needed to think on my feet and go into explanatory monologues with clients on occasion, but that sort of spur-of-the moment, spontaneous occurrence was almost never planned and I rarely found it intimidating. This was in large part because I had full confidence in what I was saying. Always a plus.

Say the words presentation or public speaking, however, and most people, myself included, lose sight of the pragmatism demonstrated in my previous example. Then it comes down to pure and unadulterated fear of the fight-or-flight variety.

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Today I loaded a 50 Kg drum of glue into a Porsche 911. Yes, you read right, I mean a real live Porsche 911 sports car, not an old beat up Toyota with a bumper sticker that says “My other car is a Porsche”. And no, I’m not giving up on design and writing and going into the manual labour market any time soon, but this is an interesting story anyway.

My Dad works in the field of industrial chemicals, and being the overly conscientious worker that he is, it is not unheard of for us to sometimes take a detour during his off hours to make some small but urgent delivery to one of his clients. It’s usually a bag or a few bottles of some of the more harmless stuff he deals in. This evening we set out on the mission to deliver a drum of food grade glue to a guy whose factory would come to a stand still without it. We arranged to meet him somewhere convenient and set off. I’m used to seeing some guy in a pickup truck or a normal saloon car take the delivery at these meetings, but this time was different. The person we were meeting was new in town and unfamiliar with the place, so a few quick exchanges on the phone later we were told to look for the Porsche in the parking lot. That piece of information didn’t really sink in until we pulled over next to a metallic silver Porsche 911 and the person at the wheel waved out to attract our attention.

Now, most of you are thinking, “Wow! A Porsche!”, but that was not the thing that had my attention. One of the sad side effects of living in Dubai is that you see too many super cars too often and seeing a Porsche is not really an occasion for surprise any more, at least when you drive around as much as we do. No, my concern was more in the area of, “How in blazes do you fit a drum into that car?”. We stopped, said hello to the young guy at the wheel and then things got more interesting: the drum we were carrying was not the smallish plastic 25 Kg version I was accustomed to seeing during these deliveries, instead it was a double sized 50 Kg model!
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Who doesn’t like a pretty face? A show of hands please … anyone? … I didn’t think so. We all love a pretty face and most of us are willing to do just about anything for one. Helen, from the Greek myth of Troy, is said to have been one of the most beautiful women to walk the Earth, and people were willing to go to war for her. She was the face that launched a thousand ships. Now quickly snap back into our current age and ask yourself the honest answer to this question: Would the face of my blog inspire that kind of dedication?

Unfortunately, for the majority of the blogs out there, the answer would be a resounding NO! Why should you care? Because, in spite of everything you were told as a kid, the fact remains that we all judge books by their covers. I go a step further and take pride in the fact that I can spot a good book by its cover with a fair amount of accuracy. Appearances and “what lies beneath” are often more in-sync than the political-correctness-brigade would like to admit. People’s faces are not just window dressing, they are a big part of who they are, and the same goes for your blog. You cannot completely separate content from presentation in human beings, books, or blogs because we are very visual animals, and visual animals read a lot into what they see. What they read is often right.

To understand what you can do to make your blog theme a stunner, you first need to understand what the theme of a blog actually does for the reader. The reason I’ve been rambling on about human faces so far is because it’s something we can all relate to, and because many of the same reasons faces are important also hold true for the layout of your blog:
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It all started with a phone call. Some friends of mine were leaving town and shifting back to France, and I was left wondering what I could possibly give them as a parting gift. An international move is no simple task and so giving my friends a domesticated Indian elephant or anything similarly cumbersome was out of the question. I would have to stick to something simple like a card - easy to carry, and it can say and mean so much if done properly.

It had to be really special though, so I thought I would up the ante and make it a pop up card. Paper crafts have been an obsession of mine since well before I can remember. I’ve always loved the feeling of creating something out of seemingly nothing and creating three dimensions out of two. In recent times all my paper projects have been heavily based on computer layouts and imagery, but due to time constraints on this one I decided to go caveman and create this card in the good old-fashioned digital-free way that I used in a time before keyboards, mice, bits and bytes.

The experience was extremely rewarding and I think everyone should do this sort of non-digital creative work on occasion to jolt your thinking a little. Here are some general pointers on how you can go about it for best results, along with the story of my pop up card about ‘home’.

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A few days ago I finally received some copies of a quarterly print newsletter I work on with Vishal. I’ve been working on this regularly for over two years now. For most of that time I worked on it with Anjali. In fact we came up with it together from scratch when a local engineering contracting company in Dubai wanted a complete makeover of their in-house newsletter. During that time I had very little to do with design and production, which was handled by Anjali using the standard Photoshop + Illustrator + InDesign setup. At the end of last year she moved home-base so I took over the mantle of getting this done every three months with Vishal’s help. The first major stumbling block was that I didn’t currently own Photoshop or Illustrator or InDesign, and I hadn’t owned or used them in a long time. Since the last few years had been almost completely devoid of large scale print projects for me, I had never felt the need. I had moved on to open source software.
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Did you know that March used to be the first month of the year?

It’s true. In fact, January and February didn’t even exist until they were invented by the Romans around 700BC. And it was a whole 650 years later that Julius Caesar declared January to be the first month of the year. He really liked pushing people around, that guy. But some people refused to be pushed. You’ll be surprised to learn that January didn’t become the official beginning of the year in France until the 1500s. And the British colonies didn’t accept the January New Year until the mid 1700s.

Now put yourself into March’s shoes. It must be the most disgruntled month of them all. How would you like to have enjoyed the limelight for so long and then to be cast aside as simply that calendar month that appears between that very short month of the year and April fools day, and everyone was told to beware of your ‘ides’? Not very glamorous is it?

Purely to make it up to our much loved and very hard working month of March, I present to you this table calendar that you can print out and put together. I hope you enjoy it and I encourage you to forward it to everyone you know who would appreciate the chance for a fresh start.

Wishing you a very Happy New Year. It’s never too late for new beginnings …

Download PDF (483 kb)

For all you wallpaper enthusiasts, here are large versions of the illustration from the calendar for your desktop:

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