Group Portfolios on Coroflot
March 30, 2009 | Articles | Member's WorkPosted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]
I wanted to take a moment to shine a spotlight on an interesting new development on Coroflot that occurred without any action on our part whatsoever: group and project portfolios.
The vast majority of portfolios here consist of the work of a single designer -- that was the original intent of the site, and it's still something it does well. Recently though, we've started noticing "members" with a more collective bent, two of which I'd like to briefly highlight.The first one, called Augmented Coast, documents a joint studio program between students at Louisiana State University, the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, focusing on Louisiana's hurricane-prone Gulf Coast region. The portfolio is remarkable for its size -- over 1500 images total! -- and the manner in which it is structured. Each of the 47 sets within the portfolio documents the work of one student, as far as we can tell, letting the viewer follow a single perspective on the project before moving on to the next. The diversity within and between the students' sets is magnificent, ranging from plant life samples, photocollages and annotated maps exploring the geography of the region, to more abstract representations like sketches, wire sculptures and chipboard plane studies. It's very much a whole-greater-than-the-sum entity, in which each student's work illuminates a different side of a complex topic.
The second example is the group portfolio from the Bristol Design Festival, which showed up in our Featured Images list on Friday (and which we're eagerly watching for new uploads). It appears to be a work in progress, with photos of several entries from the Festival's GRAFIKEA coffee-table hacking competition up already, followed by some snapshots from the festival floor. Hopefully there's more coming, because what's been posted so far is a lot of fun, and as with the Augmented Coast portfolio, it succeeds in its probable primary task of getting viewers interested enough to find out more -- I clicked on their URLs, anyway, and am glad I did.
As editorial director, this sort of thing excites the hell out of me. One of the things you hope for when building a community site like Coroflot is that the tools you create for members to use start uncovering applications you never would have thought of yourself. These are a couple of great examples, and I'd urge anyone involved in a large student project or group show to consider giving it a try themselves, and letting us know how it goes.
