My UX writing portfolio without WordPress — carbon.made
A mini-series about crafting your UX writing portfolio with minimal effort and maximized outcome.
In my previous article leading up to this mini-series, I outlined the way to successfully amping up your confidence for your UX writing job hunt:
In this part of the series, I am showcasing carbon.made, a browser-based tool specifically designed for UX design portfolios. The following notes will give you an insight into how the interface looks and feels.
Hibernation mode: off
Right now, my page is sleeping. You still pay the annual price but no monthly fee. All the work you invested is still there this way. But to be frank, it really did not take that much time! It is no surprise to me in hindsight that carbon.made was my obvious choice in the end. The handling is very intuitive and visually oriented folks like me appreciate the ease of playing with the interface of your future portfolio.
Static versus dynamic experiences
Sidenote: debating what PDF portfolios share with portfolio websites and what their differences are, comes up a lot in my mind while writing this. Simply put, a PDF is static, you are guiding the eyes of your audience. You decide what you put first and second, last and first.
A website, on the other hand, is dynamic and surprising and you cannot steer your viewers in a pre-fabricated way— at least not completely as long as we’re talking a page you are carving out of a template-based framework and not a uniquely coded piece just for the user flow you envisioned. Would be a lot to ask for from Uxfolio and carbon.made, right?
Two pages for one price
As a freelancer, I was both offering my skills as a UX consultant — such as workshops, copy training, UX and content audits, strategic and conventional consulting and SEO with a UX touch — as well as showcasing my UX writer portfolio. This was the page I planned on using instead of a PDF document or as a link to go with it.
The case study solo pages looked really tidy with the pre-designed blocks and gave me structure as well as a layout I could get on board with.
You can modify all font specs at once, as you can see in TIER’s example. On the page for consider.ly, you get an idea of how seamless and easy adding images was, as well as adjusting them in size.
On a polished canvas, even snapshots do the trick
My page for my work for From Scratch Communications showcased their profile of me and what they do, both simple screenshots from the copy collective’s website. I had just started being part of their squad and the only job I had delivered was with a time-sensitive NDA.
But I wanted to include my commitment anyway, so I chose to use this as a more personal puzzle piece while waiting for the examples of my finished jobs to come through. So in case you are also wondering how to bridge a time gap like this, I hope my workaround is a kind of inspiration:
Carbon.made also offers an “About me” page, linked to from each of your pages, where you can use the preset blocks to enter your details of the industries you worked in and all kinds of experience you might want to mention.
The same feature also goes for linking to clients, adding hashtags like #BLM or design manifestos— as I did with mine:
Convinced by carbon.made
The overview page I chose, in the end, was just square tiles, there I kept my top 8 cases, a little much maybe? I confess: the tidy, clean look made me do it!
I liked working with the tool right from the get-go, the folks over there really did an amazing job!
How did I find out about this? I saw a post on LinkedIn by one of the bright brain behind Semplice and carbon.made, Tobias van Schneider:
If you want to find out how the other options did and why I chose carbon.made for my online portfolio, these are the other three parts of the series:
Designing my online UX writing portfolio, no-budget, no-nonsense UX — Notion
Designing my online UX writing portfolio without a line of code — uxfolio
Designing the PDF version of my UX writing portfolio that landed me my current job — with Google Slides
— I hope this is helpful, let me know what you think!
Disclaimer: this is not sponsored, this is just my own opinion, looking back when I was assembling my very own UX writing portfolio and testing out the waters which way would be the best for me to go.
