My Original "Portfolio" Design, made in Adobe Spark.

My first step towards introducing myself to the world.

After graduating college, ecstatic and with Degree in hand, I set out to try and woo some potential employers. I needed to find a way to adequately combine my work, and present myself to the industry in general.

While researching digital storytelling platforms for my Final Project I had found and assessed a few impressive and powerful tools for content creation. One of these was Adobe Spark (then called Adobe Slate). This is a tool developed to tell mixed media stories, framed using very polished and well-realised effects and formats, achieving results very similar to those of websites created by talented developers using advanced CSS and HTML5.

Its interface is clean, easy to use, intuitive and you can integrate many different types of media seamlessly into your design. The resulting page is then hosted by Adobe and you can share a web address to people or use it as a link on another website. I compiled what I had available to me at the time into the page, set up some nice effects and formatting and included it in every CV and application I made for a number of months until I finally managed to get this website up and running. 

The experience of Adobe Spark is interesting when set in comparison to Squarespace, the service currently being used to build this site. While undoubtedly Squarespace offers much more advanced tools and navigation, hosting, domains and an easily managed set of tools for site architecture, its themes can be very rigid and hard to modify. The formatting can be tricky to personalise, and you need to find other ways to host files such as Issuu, which I was forced to use to host the Making Traxx UX document. With Spark you can modify things on the fly, sections can be altered in blocks to host images, text, video etc, but these blocks can be easily modified and personalised to create attractive effects and adds real professional polish with very, very little effort. You can quickly and easily throw a page together that can tell your story, add your content and do it all with slick, polished elements and effects. 

Adobe Spark is also free with and Adobe CC license so if you have one, I'd suggest you give it a try.