Multimedia (Digital) Portfolio

Contexts for Digital Portfolios

Multimedia or digital portfolios are quickly becoming an important means of featuring the work of students, artists, graphic designers, engineers—anyone who has samples to share with peers, potential employers, or the general public. A professional portfolio can serve as a repository where students archive class projects, essays, and any other work that illustrates the scope of their endeavors. In some courses, you may be asked to keep a portfolio of your work to demonstrate your accomplishments over the course of a semester.

Elements That Might Be Included in a Professional Student Portfolio

  • Background information: a short narrative biography about who you are and what you do. In professional portfolios, it’s often best not to share too much specific and sensitive information about yourself unless you don’t mind being contacted by random visitors to your site.
  • Resume or vita: a printable document stored as a PDF file, created with Adobe Acrobat or a PDF conversion plug-in such as PDF Maker for Microsoft Word or the stand-alone freeware CutePDF.
  • Sample publications and projects: PDF versions of your printed work, screenshots of websites, video projects, scanned artwork, links to your work on the Web.
  • Weblog: your running commentary on current events in your field of interest, discussions of the work of others. (See chapter 21.)
  • Links and resources: a storehouse of links to websites that you find useful in your own work and that others might benefit from, a collection of documents that you have authored and that you can share with others, or a news aggregate.

Sample Portfolio

Michael Angeles’s digital portfolio at many of these components in a nicely designed and professional package. He is a professional working in the design of information systems. Notice how he has designed his portfolio so that it is easy to navigate. Each node presents summaries and samples of his work, with links offsite where appropriate. His site was constructed using a free (open source) content management system called Drupal, which includes a weblog:

Planning Your Portfolio

Consult the project checklist in 23k (“30 Questions for Planning Multimedia Projects”) as you plan your multimedia portfolio.

Documenting Your Decisions

See the writing project titled “Multimedia Technology Autobiography” for steps you can take to storyboard your multimedia portfolio, to create an assets list, to keep a project log, and to complete design notes for a web-based multimedia project.