Scrabooli Studio

I was talking to my mother on the phone yesterday, about this blog, because I was getting myself all confused as to what it is meant to ‘be’ and how it should be laid out …. is it meant to be just a burble of whatever vaguely artistic in subject crosses my mind? …. or a serious site where I can provide tutorials and tools for others and so on? … or is it primarily a folio site to display my finished work?

Which got me thinking …. …. ….  Just what is an online folio anyway?

When she mentioned that it should be a folio site… well my head just decided that was way too formal. because, well, what is the 1st thing that comes to mind when you think of a folio?

For me it it a large black leather album with photos and other work carefully laid out on the – usually also black – pages and all of it neatly labeled. Then, on the other hand an image comes to mind from a fictional book somewhere of an Edwardian Lady with her folio of paintings all neatly held on rack on a wheeled trolley.

In transferring that concept to modern media, we get the idea that a folio is a carefully laid out web page of images, using sub pages as needed and ‘galleries’ for each topic. Alternatively it could be something very similar, but burnt to DVD instead. It might include still images, as well as moving images and even music.

This is the most popular folio layout style on the web – eg, personal galleries, flickr, stock agencies, ‘light boxes’, flash slide shows, etc. However, many of these are also dynamic folios, in that they are searchable through the tag system, effectively letting the user create their own ‘folio’ out of the artist’s work to look through. So, in a way, folios are becoming much less artist driven: in that the artist no longer decides exactly what the viewer sees, or in what order they see it, or even what combination of images are viewed together.

That put my head in a spin and I realized that I could just incorporate the ‘traditional’ type folio idea right into the blog – instead of having it on a separate set of pages. I have seen a couple of other design/art blogs doing that same thing, but had dismissed the idea as impractical. But perhaps it is not, perhaps it is actually much more sensible!

After all, Wordpress uses a nice set of categories and tags for posts which readers can use to find the type of content/images they are interested in viewing, but at the same time, if I want to control which images are seen together, I can just put them together in one post.

So, getting back to the ‘What is an Online Folio?’ question …. It seems to me, that an online folio is, at it’s most basic, a collection of stuff that you present to the world in order to show what you can do, what your style is, who you are and what you are like. If a blog is part of your folio site, then your folio is not just your images/work, it is what you say about them too, and how you interact with the world, it is anything you say in that blog. Where the traditional folio of images was usually presented in person, an online folio is presented remotely. … So, in effect, the rest of the blog is like an interview, helping potential clients get to know you as a person rather than as a collection of works.

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I would love to know your thoughts on this …. and what solutions you have come up with. After all, we are the ones that set the trend for the future.

Thinking of the future, just a another random thoght … What are online folios and blogs going to look like in the future when screens are 3D? How will 2D data be presented? not to mention navigation – 3D mice? Or just reach in and touch the links? the mind boggles!