One of the issues that plagues a professional life is how to give someone access to yourself. Business cards as a medium are antiquated at best, landfill matter at worst. Then again, emailing someone your entire life story and such isn’t a very feasible option either.
Tangent: Then again, maybe you don’t want to share your whole life story, which goes into the whole “who do I share x and y with” debate. More importantly, how do I keep certain tidbits from my shenanigans from going into the wrong hands, such as employers. But that’s another debate. Personally, anything placed online can be interpreted as “public”, and anything you don’t want to get out that you put up, probably will make the rounds.
Anyways so, you’ve established a credible online profile, with your works ranging from personal philosophies to professional writing on the web, and you don’t have anything (or very much) to be ashamed about. Sharing more than one of these leads to just a mess of links…presented in a not very awe-inspiring fashion – yes, the underlined blue links went out ages ago, but don’t tell Blogger that.
Enter About.me. This creates a wonderful, eye-candy full portal linking to everything you could want – pretty much any public profiles on your location, photo, and network platforms are available to link to in a very iPhone like tile arrangement, under a 3000 character limit biography about yourself.
Some work could be done with customizing the background a bit better and picture resizing (I was looking for a perfect picture for almost half an hour, until I gave up and went with a Sun God look alike). You can most definitely have a beautiful custom background picture of yourself – that is, if you spend some time working it that is outside of the service, and making sure it conforms to the pixel guidelines hidden on the page. And although the default backgrounds are not bad, many of them are difficult to work with regarding text visibility – the black text on white effect doesn’t work when your text overlaps into the black subject in the background. This is where text box resizing of your biography, which should be a simple implementation, would easily fix a hugely detrimental issue, which frankly is just a huge oversight on the designers part.
Nonetheless, the product makes a great stab at solving a professional world plague – how do I present myself and show someone my entire portfolio of me? I’m very happy to use it, hence why I set one up.
And really, when it comes to showing off the portfolio of you, it’s hard to not embrace the public nature of all these platforms. Uniting them all under one umbrella is a definite no-brainer.
