Current use
Currently I use this website as an introduction, short portfolio, and place to store experiments and projects that might want more words or staying power than a social media post. I try to keep it somewhere between a personal and a professional website—i.e., nothing that wouldn’t be acceptable in either circumstance—and am trying to grow my own personal slice of the World Wide Web.
Website History
I made the first version of this website on WordPress in 2015 or so during my first year of university, after I applied to the BFA program, in order to house a portfolio of the small bit of design work I had done already (both for enshrinement and backup). It was mostly a static portfolio, and rarely updated.
Eventually, during the latter half of either my 2nd or 3rd year of University, I purchased a domain name and moved my portfolio over to a Cargo Collective (then version 1) website. I had a strong focus on Design & Production courses at the time, and mostly kept design projects uploaded as I completed their coursework. Our professors made a strong push for creating a portfolio website, to the degree of taking a URL to a webpage as an assignment submission.
A while after graduation my focus was mostly on production and stage management work, so the website went fairly stagnant—I had heard people found it while looking me up, but I don’t know how much it actually helped in getting the work I was looking for or showed up before I had been brought onto projects. I also eventually moved back to WordPress.
In early 2022, I did an overhaul with the intention of adding more personality and “personal website” features, switched themes, and started trying to use the domain and my slice of the internet more often.
Notes and disclaimers
Some projects in the portfolio section have had their publish date backdated if I added them a long while (I.e. months or years) after their true completion. I often come across items that make me think “I should have added that to my website” or try to make updates to encompass more of my body of activities after the fact, but like to balance that with keeping meaningful metadata.
Duston Baranow-Watts 