UX Portfolio Review Session!

Tom Deforest of the Temple Department on the roots off innovation, to Graphic Design 235..

There was a whole group of FamilySearch UX folks, the "LDS Church User Experience Interview Team," offering portfolio review from 5:00-7:00 this afternoon, in Spori 335, and they also dropped by class earlier for Tom up there to give a presentation, and all will be at the career fair tomorrow. But let's focus on the portfolio review, shall we?

Those are great. I love getting feedback on my work; it really validates a lot of my anxiety and self doubt :P but really it's always great to go over portfolios, review them and see what people are looking for in a portfolio and a review. I do it as often as I get this kind of opportunity, and here is what I gathered from this time:

Your portfolio should tell a story. The continuity from the past, pointing in a direction, should be able to indicate some future, most especially a future at, whatever company or whatever you're trying to do design for. Telling a story with your portfolio means more than just the problems you had to overcome with the designs, like I already knew/had learned about on previous portfolio reviews. Telling a story includes showing a piece, and showing what you learned from doing that piece, and what you would do differently were you to tackle the problems now.

Continuing my Brad Bird kick, now! Found some great blogposts analyzing the cinematography of The Incredibles. They are looong but they are good. Each shot of that film is a masterpiece, and these posts analyze how and why. (And the script is also a masterpiece. And the casting has Sarah Vowell, how great is that? And it's just a great movie.)

part 1
part 2
part 3

And also, rewatching Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol for the, whateverth, time. It's the best time yet, probably because I haven't seen it in over a year (I did watch it a bunch of times when I got back from my mission, so I can't say "years") so there's a lot that's fresh and a lot that smacks me like it's newborn, but I know the plot already so I can also follow at a much deeper level than the first time. And the film does have levels. Check it:

The Carter/Hanaway/Moreau relationship we see play out on screen mirrors a lot of the relationship that plays out in Brandt's backstory, with Julia seemingly getting killed and Brandt blaming himself for it. You can really see this in the scene where Brandt is upset at Carter for offing Moreau- he sees himself too much here...

Also, Hendricks doubling as Wistrom for no reason is kind of weird (where does he get the IMF technology? It's never explained) but it does offer us the one time in the film where the mask technology actually works, and it's a Mission: Impossible movie, you gotta have the masks.