Portfolio Mission Statement

This semester I worked on three main projects for my composing in the new media class. In these projects, I decided to base around my small business, Miçanga Swimwear and the experience of entrepreneurship and travel. During the class, I worked on creating a aesthetically pleasing and functional digital user experience as well as organizing and creating content for my business. In the first two projects, I was able to create interesting and unique content from my website micangaswim.com. My first project consisted of three blogs that discussed Rio De Janeiro, traveling within Brazil, and our personal brand story. In these blogs, I had to dig deeper than a short text and really get into some storytelling techniques as well as deal with the visual of the blocks in my website. In the actual design of the website I drew inspiration from our discussions in class to improve the user experience and free people to the site. I saw the blogs as a way to share the brand to a larger audience, and bring some creative freedom into the business. Blogs help to establish the brand as they told her story from a very raw perspective while also offering helpful information. In my first draft of my blogs, I was very literal and to the point. It was difficult for me to find a solid idea, but I decided to talk about things to know before Brazil, since it was a interesting and very niche topic that could be useful to others. In this blog, I spent a lot of time formatting, and eventually came up with a five things to know format. In my revisions, I decided to add more context and detail, change up my wording, and use a bit more playful and informative language. I would say that my first blog is my favorite blog because of the information I’m giving. My second blog follows the main idea of the first blog, which is travel recommendations. I plan to continue this blog series with every place I go and create accompanying photo journals. Learning how to write and blog formats and improve upon this skill, was very useful for me. My second project was my photo diary series that accompanied the blogs on my website. In the photo diary series, I highlighted photos that I shot at each location and created curated albums on my website. I wanted to be able to highlight the places in the people using my product in a unique and interesting format. I assumed it would be easier to create these photo galleries, however, it was very challenging. I tried multiple different services to build the photo galleries, but I had a lot of user experience challenges and coding issues. In order to build the photo galleries on my website, I had to learn how to code the galleries in and arrange the files. It was challenging, but at the end of the day I learned a lot, and I will be continuing upon this series with every new location I visit. I think that the combination of the blogs and the photo diaries give an authenticity and interesting twist to my brand. Lastly, I worked on a podcast about entrepreneurship. In my podcast, I wanted to give some tips to new entrepreneurs and tell a bit about my story to motivate and warn people starting new businesses about the difficulties and the rewarding parts. Doing a podcast was very difficult for me, as I had issues in recording, and in the organization of the files. In general, I think I’m a more visual person and using my voice in this way was very offputting to me. I do think it was an interesting experience however, I will not be using this method of content creation anymore. Throughout this class, I learned a lot about the delivery, design, and experience of creating content. The in class work that we did was very useful to me, and being able to apply these skills to a project that I’m currently working on, was very rewarding. I like the experience-based aspect of the class and excelled in the blog and visual assignments. If you’d like to view my portfolio, you could look at the posts underneath the photo diary page of my website. Since it’s an e-commerce website, I can’t put the portfolio on the front page. However, all of the assignments will be under this tab on the main menu. Please check out my work and let me know what you think in the comments. Thank you.

Below is the podcast, If player is not working, please visit https://on.soundcloud.com/sRKsbkyYxsVU1qHHA