Wallace's Manifesto

In the Beggining

Wallace was an idea I had while dogsitting one Sunday afternoon. In between applying for jobs, I felt like I needed a space that let me explore my creativity through my own personal projects. While I appreciate the presentation and documentation of my projects within my portfolio, there is a clearly defined use case for what a portfolio is/does. To me, a design portfolio is a semi-serious place for my projects to be displayed. I don't take risks in my presentations and I try to let the projects speak for themselves.

"To me, a design portfolio is a semi-serious place for my projects to be displayed. I don't take risks in my presentations and I try to let the projects speak for themselves."

Although this take is extremely based on my own insecurities as a designer, I was longing for a space that I could dump my projects, thoughts, explorations, learnings, and design journals into without the fear of being judged. Being a young designer I need to learn about what I like and what I hate. I need to take risks. I need to try new things. Explore new tools. Find what I love. Find what I hate...

But I can't do that if I'm too caught up in my own insecurities about what people will think about my work.

I find that the only place where I'm exposed to taking big risks is at work. Whether it's doing freelance graphic design and getting flamed for poor photo treatments or doing UI work on an AI tool and getting told my designs don't match the brand standards, I feel like I'm constantly taking risks and pivoting at the last minute when an oversight happens. I find that when I'm told that the design I have worked on for so long doesn't meet expectations, I'm really happy to fix it up -- but there's only so much I know about design. I can't make stunning graphics, or even follow a branding guideline for that matter. I don't know what looks good and I don't know what looks bad. Sometimes I'm just a floating insecurity throwing designs at a brick wall and seeing what sticks.

My theory about this is that I'm young and I don't have a natural born artistic sense that tells me what looks good and what doesn't. So, in efforts to become a better designer, I need to practice flexing my design muscles in low stakes environments. I think this will help me gain some confidence in being a designer and making well thought out design choices in the future.

In doing all of this thinking on that Sunday afternoon, I lacked paper. I tore apart a Trader Joe's bag and began mind mapping out my thoughts. Some of my favorites include:

"Wallace was born out of unparalleled curiosity and abundance of time"
"It doesn't matter, I just have to start somewhere"
"NOT: a library"
"A place with no pressure to be something because it's anything"
"Mantra: Explore Creativity"
"Jack Schutz Design Island" (Lower Right)

After finishing my mind map I was really really excited. I had a major idea of what a design brain could look like and how I could harness my love of documentation and presentation in a low stakes digital environment.

I started by choosing a name, Wallace, and then brainstorming out how the website should function. I jumped into diagraming a robust system that would allow me to easily expand and build out pages based on their function.

No need to read this chicken scratch... I just really wanted to get rid of this bag and felt bad if I throw it away if its a piece of history.

Again with the chicken scratch site map in the background... This one includes branding language though if you squint really hard.

Diagram City

I wanted to keep the site map very simple so that I was encouraged to use the system. Overly complex systems have too many facets and my ADHD gets overwhelmed and I don't end up using them... it's a whole thing.

This system is a home page and only three other major pages: Physical, Digital, and On My Mind. Every project I ever work on should be able to fit within these three pages.

The pages should also be primarily visual and spark curiosity from the viewers. I also would like to be able to view a lot of my projects at one time.

Physical Design is a place for physical products that I have designed and made. This is a space for things like:

3D Modeling and Printing
Product Renderings
Building Products That I Use
Creating things I wish I had
Documenting Process
Exploring Tools I Own
- Cricut
- Sewing Machine
- 3D Printer
- Computer

Digital Design is a place for digital products that I have worked on or product concepts I think of. This is a space for:

UX/UI Improvements
Graphic Designs
Photoshop Redesigns of Experiences
Web Design
Branding and Content Design
Exploration of Web tools
- Email Marketing Tools
- SEO
- AI Prompt Engineering and Generative Text

What Else?

Oh yeah, and everything else!

Although most of my projects fit into either the physical or digital category, I realized there needs to be a space for everything else that floats around my brain with meaning but no place to land.

I often feel like my thoughts are scattered in a million different directions. This confused me because there was no organization for my brain to work with-it was just all thoughts all the time.

I imagined how a website like Wallace could help me. I use a lot of written media places to express my thoughts and feelings. These are things like:

Notion: an organized place for me to post all of my thoughts
Poetry Journal: a little journal that serves as a landing place for any poetry I find I need to write
Moments Journal: a flipbook notebook collection of dates and times and what I am doing at that exact time
Pearls and To Dos: a junk journal for all of my extra things
Comic Sketchbook: this green notebook is a place to write out little pictograms I think up on a whim
Diary: a black hardcover notebook for my personal processing of life events

All this is great, but what were the missing pieces to my expression? What are ways in which I exist that aren't being honored by me?

For instance, if I saw funny graffiti in the world I would snap a picture of it. Then, over time, that picture would sink to the depths of my camera roll until I looked at it again. This happened a lot with my photos, and seems to be a common occurrence with digital natives today. How do we organize our photos in a way that honors them? Further, do all photos taken hold meaning? Even further, do all thoughts we think have meaning? And, is there value tied to every individual action we do as humans, or do we create value by honoring the important individual actions?

woah

So, maybe too big of questions to be asking on a Sunday while dogsitting. Nevertheless, asking these bigger, purpose driven questions allowed me to explore my emerging thoughts. When designing "the rest" of Wallace, I stopped to think about the uniting factors of my thoughts and what types of categories I could make out of them.

Some category ideas:

Funny Thoughts
What I'm Reading
Pictures I Like
Pictures I Hate
Weird Screenshots
Best One Liners
...The list goes on.

One of the main reasons I can come up with all of these lists of uniting things is thanks to my notion. I use notion in my daily life to document my thoughts. Like. all of my thoughts.

As I brainstormed more however, it was important that I didn't create redundancies in my life. I don't want to feel like I'm posting things just to post them. I didn't want to feel like I had to upload content to these places just so I had content. I want it to feel real and relevant and important to me.

I want each expressive channel of my life to have a purpose and I loathe copying from myself.

All this being said, I needed a place to unite all of my digital archives that honored it. I created "My Brain" as an expansive library to host all of my stuff. Because it's miscellaneous, it serves as a catch all for the things I want to display without overwhelming the viewer with random stuff. I like this method because it has all of these really great buckets for me to drop in my favorite things when I have the time to. It's a great meshing of honoring my pictures and thoughts without being too intrusive or causing me to dread the process.

That's It! That's Wallace!

That is how Wallace came to be! Simple as that my friend :)))

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