Thursday, July 19, 2012

The Counseling Geek: A Guide to Digital Portfolios

The video below shows you how I storyboard and created the portfolio, so you can create your own.

A few notes before the video: First is to make this portfolio represent your personality. Have fun with it, but keep in mind the viewer. Things to avoid are: fonts that are difficult to read (try to stick to a serif or sans serif font), unflattering photos, and colors that do not go together. Also, use a site like stock.xchng to find free, high-quality stock images to use as a background (and other images) for your portfolio. The packaged images in PowerPoint are tacky and overused so try to spruce it up (check out the categories of texture, light blurs, etc). You can also deselect the "advance slide on click" option to only let users click on hyperlinks, which is nice so they don't click and accidentally advance to the next page (thank you to my wife for user testing my portfolio and finding that nugget of info). Finally, try to break away from using the slide templates. Start with a blank template and add things like text boxes, your own images, and smart images (not word art!). This gives you both flexibility and a customized look.


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