My first steps in developing the mtheory.media portfolio site were to consider its express purpose and audience. This site is part of my application to the University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts, Media Arts + Practice PhD program. The main purpose of this site is to showcase my creative, academic, and professional work for review by an admissions committee. It is also a way for reviewers to get to know me better as an artist, scholar, and as a person, outside of the more formal Personal Statement and Résumé/CV. My Design Brief was further shaped by the USC SCA PhD Application Procedures. For example, statements such as “applicants are encouraged to emphasize quality over quantity in selecting materials” and “time-based works should not total more than 15 minutes” served as the initial basis for my design approach.

Beyond the above parameters, I began to think of the portfolio site as a design opportunity. I wanted the site to be more than just a place to view previous collected work. I wanted it to be part of the media work submission itself: an example of my design mind made manifest. I needed a cohesive, intentionally designed custom theme rather than a standard portfolio website template. 

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about Marshall McLuhan and the idea of “the medium is the message” in relation to how culture has shifted with the rise of first the internet, and then social media, and now Generative Artificial Intelligence — and the mind-blowing and far-reaching power of the intersection of these three. After re-reading McLuhan’s Understanding Media, I happened upon Grant N. Havers’ recent book, The Medium is Still the Message: Marshall McLuhan for Our Time. I knew immediately that I wanted to build my portfolio website theme around these ideas.

I’ve also been thinking about the formation of identity in our increasingly mediated world. How we choose to curate and publicly display our mediated personas in the digital world has become an ongoing cultural conversation. The divide between “celebrity” and everyone else has become increasingly blurred in our presentation of self. A website portfolio, by its very nature, is a mediated presentation of the self: a self-portrait of a sort. In this case, more specific and focused than social media. 

All of these ideas, taken together, informed my design thinking and research.

The designer in me then asked, “But what does that look and feel like?” 

Thus, my full design brief was born:

1.) Adhere to SCA Application Procedures and Guidelines.

2.) Create a visual, media-rich, content driven, user experience that illustrates the concept “the medium is the message.”

3.) Integrate the idea of a portfolio as self-reflection/self-portraiture — a work unto itself — and an extension of my voice, of my self.

4.) Lean into my experience, rather than minimize it, my age is part of my identity.

5.) Create new, meaningful and relevant content expressly for this website, while showcasing previous work.

6.) Make the site clean and clearly organized, user friendly and easy to use, so each user can access the content they want, when they want it, however they want.

The next step was to evaluate which tools and source materials I needed to accomplish the above design brief. While some tools were easy for me to use, Avid Media Composer, for example, others I am less familiar with and had to learn as I worked. I have only basic skills with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, WordPress, and building websites in general, so these I had to learn. Of course, source materials would largely be previous work, but I would also need some new assets to build the site’s layout and look, as well as to create new content.

When deciding on a domain name for my portfolio site, I wanted one that reflected my philosophy of media and was also tied to my name. In physics, M-theory is a proposed theory of everything that unifies all five known superstring theories into a single, 11-dimensional framework. The “M” is thought to stand for “magic,” “mystery,” or “membrane,” and was first introduced by Edward Witten in 1995 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory). Fortuitously, my last name starts with an “M.” So then, in the spirit of a mashup/remix of these disparate ideas, mtheory.media represents my own unique, unified theory of everything media.

Finally, test pattern color bars seemed the perfect fit for my header and footer. Color bars fit my aesthetic perfectly, are media-related, reflect my history with media, and provide me with a built-in color palette that is strong and high impact. This initial design choice, combined with the above design brief, informed all subsequent layout and design decisions. 

I love challenging myself creatively, which drives me to learn new things!