Notes

Portfolio Guidelines

Your portfolio is the single most vital assessment tool. It helps you to reflect upon your own work as well as allowing others to share your design process in an organized way. How you choose to organize your portfolio is up to your personal preference, however as a general guideline keep your portfolio organized in tab-separated, understandable sections. You will be responsible for the following material. Any missing material will reduce the number of credits received.

Presentation Guidelines

Your presentation should address the following issues.
  • The long/short term goals of your site and it¼s intended audience.
  • Your choice of structure and why.
  • Your interface design and why.
  • How the design/style of the site supports its content.

Site Design Checklist
This is a general outline intended to help you keep up with the design process.
  1. Gather/Review existing material and copy (text)
  2. Create site plan and site map
  3. Design Interface
  4. Make final decisions about copy (text)
  5. Revise site plan and map
  6. Create visual layouts for each page on paper
  7. Create „dummy¾ layout in HTML
  8. Prepare/scan images
  9. Create headers/background/additional graphics
  10. Complete site construction by substituting copy and finished graphics into „dummy¾
  11. Publish site and check links
  12. Make final corrections
  13. Market site

Collaboration Guidelines

When you are gathering a team, it¼s helpful to get to know your collaborators. Not just to find out if you like each other but, more importantly, to discover how you can develop a good working relationship. You may want to consider interviewing each other about your ideas and strengths. Talking to each other about your working process will allow you to negotiate a partnership without basing your working relationship purely on personality.

Some questions to ask about process

  • How do you make decisions?
  • How do you keep organized, research, plan? (Some people plan extensively, others need a more flexible structure).
  • Once you have designed the plan, how do you think of that plan ?
  • As a blueprint that needs to be adhered to?
  • As a flexible guideline which evolves as the project changes?

Talk about time and commitment. Some have allocated more time for this program in their lives than others. Some people have rigid schedules and can only do their work in two hour chunks. This is important information for everybody to know. Also, people deal with time differently. Talk about your limits.

Terms of the collaboration

There are different kinds of collaboration and different structures you can adopt. For some people, it may be important to reach consensus on every decision from conception to research to planning and design. (From my experience, this is the most exciting but also the most challenging approach).

If your approaches are very different, however, you may want to define some roles and negotiate a structure in which individual members take responsibility for different aspects of the production. You may decide that you need a structure which gives overall leadership. Even if you use this potentially more hierarchical model, you can still define the „director¼s¾ role in non-traditional (non-oppressive) ways. Maybe the director is more of a facilitator, taking the responsibility to keep track of each idea and articulating for the group how a collective vision is being developed. Maybe the original vision comes from one person and others agree to realize it, but the vision evolves as people interact with it.

How to deal with conflict

When you do have conflict, recognize that conflict means different things to different people. What sounds like assertiveness to one person may sound like aggression to another. Talk to each other about what kind of conflict might be productive. Agree on guidelines for arguing.

Use active listening skills. When you ask someone a question, focus on the person who is speaking and really hear what s/he says. Repeating what you hear will let the other person know if you have listened accurately. Practice verbalizing with „I¾ phrases: non-judgmental descriptions of problems you¼re having, not problems you think they¼re having. Give each person the opportunity to voice how s/he perceives the conflict, and what s/he thinks are the solutions.

If you get stuck, ask someone whom you all agree can be neutral in the situation to play a mediator role. Remember that your peers are there for you; think of the class as a resource. Everybody in the class has some experience with collaboration and can offer you different perspectives.

Finally, look at differences as an opportunity, not as an obstacle. Talking things through does work if everybody gives it a chance.

Adapted from text by Ju-Pong Lin Top