As all we fine young creative advertising professionals know good and well, there is simply nothing more important – nothing more painstakingly dramatic, and of no higher priority in life and probably even the after-life, than our portfolios. They’re the reason we neglected most of our other college curriculum. The perfect excuse for skipping out on minor (or sometimes even major if yours is particularly messed up) family events, and most importantly, it’s usually your best hope for ever actually finding a real life professional creative advertising position at an honest to goodness agency (I mean, it won’t help you get a job doing anything else whatsoever, but that only provides a wonderful excuse for sitting on your ass while in between agency jobs in the extraordinarily likely event that you will at some point be laid off or fired).

Sure, these days a few of the more clever among us are landing sweet gigs by impressing important ad people with all this modern technology and the Internet and the social media and what not. But for the vast majority of us, it remains that the level of awesomeness of our official collection of creative dreams brought to life (unless it’s spec work, in which case it’s still just a dream, but can sometimes be interesting to people if it was a good enough dream) is what it’s all going to come down to in the end.

In many cases, your portfolio’s effectiveness will be solely based on how overwhelmingly impressive your work actually is. But that doesn’t mean you can’t screw the whole thing up by creating an ugly, or too complicated, or just flat out unlikable vessel for all that outstanding work. However, if your book is full of mind-blowing real world produced creative, you may skate by with the most basic of books or websites. But for most of us newbies, the way we present our portfolios can serve as an additional creative medium for showing off just how that weird little brain of yours works, or how interesting and good of a personality fit you may possess, or even sometimes even both.

That said; it’s a fine line you have to walk if you’re going to approach the situation this way.  If you do too much, it may appear that you’re simply covering up a bunch of crappy projects. If you do too little, you may come off as lazy and uninteresting. And for we copywriters, this is where things can get extremely challenging because it’s well-known that few CD’s (or anyone else for that matter) ever bother reading a damn thing you’ve written if it has nothing to do with them. So instead of us being able to just use our primary creative tool to charm our desired agency’s pants off, we must instead either bribe or manipulate a selected art director, or think of a neat way to get people’s attention and keep it long enough for them to actually look through your entire book. Oh, or you can apparently take on the task of writing a novel all about a particularly targeted industry celeb like one writer did in order to land at Droga5 if you really have a lot of time on your hands, and yes, enough of talent and drive too.
Anyways, that brings me to the actual purpose of this blog post: the super awesome .gif I just made for my website. I know, I know, anyone can make a .gif. Not a big deal. Fair enough. Thing is, between your humbly unpaid for cargocollective account and photoshop skills (even if your skills can barely even be considered basic, like mine), you can fancy up your portfolio site without having to drop a dime, or spending more time than you have available on creating an epic masterpiece of a self-branding portfolio concept.

With a simple little .gif that you can add to your work site with the click of a button, you can say whatever you feel the need to say about yourself in a way that can be as affective as flash animation, but without all the annoying load time and technical complications.

For mine, I wanted to tell a story of passion and desire. One of mystery and intrigue. Of adventure, danger, and heroism. A story that 50% of you will think is utterly ridiculous, 47% will only find mildly amusing but not unbearable, and 3% will think is simply amazing (if I’m lucky). Did I know how to make a .gif before Friday June 24^th 2011? Hell no. But I learned real fast because as it turns out, creating a gif is very, very easy. So with no further ado, I (a little too proudly perhaps) present to you all my very first ever animated .gif. Utterly shameless self-promotion? Obviously. Still a lot of fun and very much worth testing your patience? You bet.

- Dave Fox