2016 Personal Project Resolutions: A Retrospective

2016 was a year of growth. For me this growth was both professional and personal. Many of these tests were ones I placed on myself to push myself to achieve goals I’ve been aiming at for a while. Some of these growing pains were forced on me by outside sources and situations. I don’t think there was a single person this year that didn’t feel challenged personally.

After the year we all had, looking back on my resolutions and seeing where I landed and what I have accomplished has helped me to process a lot of the changes we now see in our current society. It has also helped me introspectively to know where I want to go now.

My main areas of personal project resolutions were to travel more, grow my freelance project portfolio, and then redesign and develop my portfolio with best practices and tools I’ve now learned.

Wanderlust

Wanderlust is a new series I established more formally this year to document all the travel I did. It’s an attempt to photo document the beauty and details I’ve noticed on my travels. I also use these posts to note the activities I enjoyed and businesses I recommend along my travels.

This past year my travels took me to California, where my friend and I went from LA all the way up the coast to San Francisco. My friends from college and I are trying to make an effort to go to all 50 states and this year it was West Virginia’s turn. And finally I took a tour of the continent by travelling Europe with my sisters. We travelled from Amsterdam to Germany to Ireland.

Here are a few of my favorite selections from these trips:

California, 2016
West virginia, 2016
Ireland, 2016

freelance projects

While it’s hard to say this is a “personal project” when I was doing projects for clients – the real personal resolution was to grow my freelance portfolio as much as possible. In that regard, I launched three new sites that I designed and developed, I posted one headshot session, one engagement portrait session and a family portrait session.

Here are a few of my favorite selections from these projects and links to their specific blog posts:

LeslieFHudson.com, 2016
KristinaFriedgen.com, 2016
Engaged: Candace + Rich, 2016
Family Portraits: Charlie, 2016

 

portfolio redesign

After planning, planning, researching, planning more, and some more research, I finally started sketches and mocks until finally the 2016 redesign was launched this year.

I knew this year my portfolio redesign strategy had to be different. I wanted to make it so that I don’t have to tear down and ditch my old sites as I go forward, but rather build them with a structure that’s flexible for future iterations, improvements, extensions and enhancements. Not only did I redo my whole site, I used technologies I was learning at work and best practices I’d been studying all year.

Learn about this process here.

Here’s to another year of projects and personal growth!

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