Projects Page at UNI: How you can upload your design projects.
Share and grow your portfolio with ease.
For architects and designers, UNI provides a portfolio-building online platform as an answer to the numerous challenges faced in today's world. One of the challenges is: the painful task of documenting your evolving work in a rigid, traditional portfolio—for which, UNI’s Projects page can come to your rescue. Secondly, having your profile and your portfolio exist as two separate documents poses an inconvenience to introducing yourself in the best way possible. Thirdly, even if you bring together your profile, achievements, and all your diverse forms of work in your personal website, you still need to put a lot of effort into connecting with people and growing your work experience. You may still have to repeat and scatter your work on a number of media, even if it is to direct them towards your portfolio or website.
Presently, UNI not only gives you a space to build a portfolio alongside your profile but also helps you with getting your work discovered. It connects your projects with other forms of content like text and PDFs, rather than existing as an isolated, and majorly visual representation of your work. Additionally, by making use of UNI’s competitions, you can even build a great portfolio or add new feathers to your existing one. In the near future, we are also picturing a versioning provision for your projects. Meaning, you can share your projects’ evolution, and create opportunities for building conversations and collaborations with fellow designers on the platform.
What is the Projects page and how does it work?
This question is better answered in the form of challenges that designers face today, and what steps UNI is taking to try to tackle them. We are beginning somewhere, with positive intent. With the support and collaboration of its members, UNI hopes to create some ripples of change.
Problems that the Projects feature at UNI aims to solve:
1. Issue: Creative people can tend to be multi-dimensional, and so can their work. If you are an architect, artist or a designer, your work can exist in many formats: images and visuals, articles and blogs, PDFs and compiled portfolios, printed publications, videos, or even podcasts. In order to showcase varying forms or content, you often have to spread thin on different channels, online and offline.
Solution: UNI provides a space to bring different forms of creative work together. Your projects will not be viewed in isolation. They will exist with your detailed profile and other forms of work, enabling you to give people a holistic view without asking them to jump platforms. Not only visual content, like images, UNI offers a place for other media like journals and publications to be stored and shared—individually or in connection to your projects.
2. Issue: Even if you showcase all of your work together, on a personal website, you still engage on other social media for networking, and inviting people to discover your website.
Solution: Your work does not have to exist on an island of a website that you would need to promote elsewhere through various media. Although, presently UNI allows you to link as many digital platforms with your profile, it will serve as an umbrella for your diverse content and information.
Online portfolio-building platforms have existed for the last 15 years or so. Yet the aforementioned issue persists. There is no solution for designers that caters to work-exhibition, growth, and networking at the same time. Through UNI, everything you want can co-exist in a place where you can connect with fellow creative professionals and people who need you. Consider it similar to having your own website, with the added benefit of building social and professional connections.
3. Issue: Building and evolving a conventional portfolio is a hassle.
Solution: On an online platform like UNI, adding to your list of projects gets a lot easier. We are envisioning a future where there will be no more hassles that come with updating a portfolio. All the challenges that come with designing, redesigning, uploading and sharing a portfolio—online and offline—should no longer exist in the years to come.
4. Issue: Your traditional portfolio allows you to include only a limited amount of content. Over time, you are forced to discard quite a lot of work and information from your portfolio document, which you may have wished to retain. Yes, portfolios are meant to consolidate your work and present it comprehensively—which is a benefit. However, there are only a chosen few examples of work that you can ultimately display through the document. Designers have become creative with portfolios over the years, experimenting with online and video portfolios. But still, the tedious process of updating them remains the same.
Solution: With a web portfolio that will remain for life, the UNI Projects page is a repository for all your works. You can store multiple impressions and plenty of images without excessively worrying about file size and resolutions like in a regular portfolio. This allows you to share as many projects as you want.
How can UNI help you grow your portfolio?
In addition to your existing projects, UNI lets you create innovative and unconventional designs through competitions organised and hosted by the platform. Competitions let you push the boundaries and showcase the work that you produce through them. You can participate in competitions to build an impressive portfolio. They are also opportunities to receive feedback on your work from global experts in the industry, adding to your skills and sensibilities as a designer.
What can you do to increase your projects’ visibility through UNI?
The project uploading feature at UNI is UNIque in many ways. Our aim is also to encourage discovery of you and your work, through the platform. To aid that, UNI prompts you to add tags, location, and related disciplines to your projects while you upload them. Adding these project details and engaging with other works at UNI will positively impact your project score. A higher project score will help your project rank higher on the platform. Learn more about project score in this article. There are many other details that you can add to your project, which makes it even more interesting.
- As you follow the uploading process, you will be able to see options to:
- Upload Images or sheets containing visual presentation of your project with the optimum amount of supportive text. You can enter a title and brief description of your project, choose a cover and arrange your sheets in the sequence you want.
- Embed videos while uploading your project.
- Add Journals and Publications to supplement your designs with appropriate textual narratives. Through Journals, you will be able to share your design story. Publications can be used to attach detailed text-based information such as construction/execution details, manuals, and handbooks, guidelines, research, etc.
- Add a geographic location if your project refers to one.
- Add tagsets relevant to your project to boost its categorization and discoverability under several keywords. To make your job a little easier, UNI’s project uploader will suggest tagsets based on the content of your project images.
- Selecting disciplines (up to 4 ) that your project belongs to so that it can appear in places where relevant discussions might be taking place.
- Choose appropriate licensing if you wish to or if applicable for your project contents.
- Add team members i.e. collaborators of the project and give them due credit.
- Share organization details if you have created the project as a part of one or more organizations.
- All the projects you upload will automatically appear as a feed under your Projects tab.
What upgrades can the Projects page undergo in the future?
How a published project looks is almost never the entire story of its design process. In your own machines, you have numerous versions of a single project. This practice is so common that you are probably aware of the inside joke (and loads of memes) on the way designers name their progress version files.
But what goes on the web or your portfolio is the last one. Well, who said the last one is the only possible last? An idea can take unexpected shape at a different time as well as with different people. With a group of unique creative minds, a design can evolve differently. Solutions can get easier to find, and you can learn so much from different insights.
You can upload projects in their evolution stages, and they will be saved as versions under your Projects. You will be able to share these publicly. We are hoping to make the versioning feature available soon. One of the expected outcomes of this feature is increased opportunities for discussions, mutual exchange of ideas, and possibly, collaborations between designers on the platform.
Besides, having a place to record your evolution as a creative professional increases the level of transparency for, both, your fellow designers and the general public. It can also give hope to other designers who may feel intimidated or face self-doubt due to high standards of competition in the field. Make them learn from your progress, relate with it, feel reassured that they, too, can get better.
So, go ahead and upload projects with value-added details. Interact with other projects on the go! Feel free to share your thoughts on the Projects uploader at UNI.
