More Than a Collection: What My ID Portfolio Says About Me.

There's a difference between a portfolio and a body of work. A portfolio is curated. It's intentional. Every artifact, every color choice, every piece on the page tells a story. The story I want to tell is one of growth, purpose, and a deeply rooted commitment to designing for people first.

The Breadth Was the Point

My ID portfolio is an eclectic mix of higher education faculty challenges sitting alongside staff training solutions, because that's the reality of the work I do. My professional world doesn't live neatly in one lane, and I wanted my portfolio to represent just that.

When you look at the faculty-facing work, you'll notice a thread running through it: Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (UDL). These aren't buzzwords I sprinkle in to sound trendy. They're principles I genuinely design around, because I believe that good instruction should work for everyone, not just the majority.

On the staff side, you'll notice something different: simplicity. Clean design. Solutions that don't ask people to think harder than they need to. Because when someone is in the middle of their workday trying to navigate a process, the last thing they need is friction.

Two audiences. Two design philosophies. One throughline: meet people where they are.

Every Detail Was a Decision

Nothing in my portfolio was placed by accident.

The colors weren't chosen because they looked nice (though I hope they do). The artifacts weren't selected because they were the easiest to show. The layout wasn't left to default settings. Each decision, down to what not to include was deliberate, because I believe the portfolio itself is a design artifact. It should model the same values I bring to every project.

If I'm asking learners to trust my work, the least I can do is show them that I take the craft seriously.

The Chrome River Story: A Snapshot of My Growth

One artifact in particular tells my story better than I could in a bio ever could: the Chrome River Pre-Approval Training. It started out as a PowerPoint presentation with annotated screenshots. No Articulate. No interactivity. No intentional instructional design. At that point, I hadn't yet been exposed to the field or the tools. It was a well-meaning solution built with what I had at the time.

But I didn't archive it when I leveled up. I kept building it.

As I learned about instructional design principles, I went back. I iterated. I transformed that humble slide deck into something that reflects who I've become as a designer. That artifact is now a living record of my development. A before-and-after that I'm genuinely proud of, not because the "after" is perfect, but because it shows I don't stop at good enough.

Still Learning. Always.

If there's one thing I hope comes through in my portfolio, it's this: I am always in progress. I don't have a static definition of what "good" instructional design looks like, because the field doesn't stay still. The portfolio you're looking at is a snapshot of where I am right now. Ask me again in a year and I expect it will have changed, because I will have changed.

That is something I can promise.