Megan and Murray McMillan

We’ve been working on our portfolio update for a while now. It features new work, a new project organization and a “brief overview” (a quick way to see the top 15 images). Efficiency is key. Overly elaborate interfaces can dangerously shrink an audience’s patience (here’s an example).

We generally update this site twice a year to add new work and cycle older work to our Flickr and You Tube sites (the perfect place for older work–we even have our student work there). When we update we also reconsider the best way to format the site itself. We’ve had a online portfolio site for 6 years (since 2001); it has changed a lot since version 1. As our understanding of our work changes, the architecture of the portfolio site follows.

An older and consistent critique we heard about our portfolio site 2 years ago was that it was difficult to know what the art was: “was this a staged photo or a live performance?” To help with this, we started to organize our portfolio site by media: video in the video section, sculpture in the sculpture section and so on. However, for projects that contain several media, organizing by media only complicates matters further.

So for the last month we’ve been constructing a new organization for our portfolio site that preserves the multimedia nature of our projects while remaining clear about the media of project components. This new version is far from perfect, but it’s our first draft to negotiate this balance.