What do you do, Tatiana Mac?

 

by Jordan Kushins

Illustration by Gracia Lam

Portfolio tips from Tatiana:

● Progress over perfection. Publish before you think you’re ready, and commit to updating it periodically — whatever cadence works best for you.

● Prepare for your case studies when they’re still fresh. Integrate this as part of your debrief/post-mortem process. You don’t have to write the whole thing at once, but I find it’s a good idea to jot down notes, and collect assets onto an external drive.

● If you’re struggling to get going, start with the project or feature that excites you most. It can be as small as a spot illustration or as large as a featured case study. The important thing is to get into it.

● Ask yourself: “What’s the one thing I want someone to take away from my website?” Then make sure you answer that question. It could be: “I’m available for full-time work!” or “I’m a hybrid designer-illustrator.” Whatever it is, make sure it’s clearly stated in words, and also through images and spirit.

“What do you do?” is a new series that will explore how creative professionals define themselves, and how they express that identity to others through their online portfolio. From unique personal insights to actionable tips and tricks, each profile will share best practices to build a digital presence that feels engaging, effective, and authentic.

 

Hi Tatiana Mac! What do you do?

I think there’s a lot of filtering I do in terms of how I define myself to other people, but right now I’d say I am an engineer. 

 

If someone seems interested in hearing more, or has a background in tech and/or design, I’ll say that I primarily work in the web, and I focus on design systems and building performant and accessible websites through as ethical and inclusive lenses as I can. 

 

If someone is unfamiliar with what an engineer does, I tell them I build the web.

A glimpse of Tatiana’s portfolio.

How has your portfolio evolved over the course of your career?

I have had so many types of careers, and I’ve probably done 20 different portfolios throughout the years to adapt to different iterations [of myself] that I’ve wanted to show. Now, I don’t really want to cull projects through the lens of: I am a designer, I am an engineer, I am a writer, I am a this, that, or the other. So I have shifted my website to be less about the work I’ve made and more about the way I think — I want people to focus their energy there.

I design in the web so I built my site through my code. The first iteration of the current version was only one page, with my clients and an array of work. I was holding it close to my chest until finally, one day, I was like: “I have so much anxiety around launching this thing. Why am I putting so much pressure on myself?” So I just launched it and said: “This is what it is. I’m gonna be fixing it actively. There’s probably some bugs.”

“My audience is someone who reads my first page and says: ‘This person is intriguing — I want to work with them.’ So it’s less someone defined by a job function, and more someone defined by a type of need; someone who recognizes that they have a problem space that they’d like to unpack.”

I was very much building it “in the open,” which accomplishes several things. It challenges the problematic framing that what we do is magic, and exposes the many iterations and stages — the big middle that’s kind of messy and ugly — that we often tend to hide.

 

From there I broke that singular page into multiple pages, and then I built out those multiple pages.

Let’s take a closer look at four of your key design choices.

1. Logo

Anytime a designer designs a logo, they have to go through some existential crisis. This was really funny because I remember sitting in a meeting — a meeting that I didn’t need to be in — bored out of my mind, just doodling. I was playing with my signature like I was 14-years-old, and I started to iterate on it. I began to draw out this logo, and realized that it combined many aspects: my monogram; I’m a Gemini; and there’s numerology things with the number 11. So this was really connecting a lot of pieces, somewhat incidentally. (And I still have that original piece of paper somewhere in my files.)

2. Illustrations

In 2017 I was very burnt out. I quit my job, kind of restarted my life, went traveling, and I had a lot of time on my hands to sketch. For Inktober, I decided I was going to try to draw the hardest thing every day: Hands. (If I failed, my excuse was that they’re hard!) Every day I woke up and, whatever city I was in, I would draw hands based on the prompts. Some of them turned out pretty well, so I digitized them and had this whole database. Then I did a similar project with Tarot cards. From these, I was able to pull out spot illustrations that I liked and use them for my website. I created these assets for no one, and then I was like: I can use them for me.

3. Color

The color theory and foundation of my site was very much nostalgic-, ‘90s web- inspired. I built a core palette including link blue and [hover state] fuchsia, then created levels [of these colors] for accessibility purposes. I wanted to be sure that I was using them in a high-contrast manner, and that I wasn’t creating vibration.

4. Sh*tposts

I think that a portfolio often feels very serious — like it’s this business presentation. I don’t take myself too seriously, and I like working with people who don’t take themselves too seriously. I also really love sh*tposting on Twitter. (Sh*tposting is kind of the opposite of thought leadership. That’s how I’ll leave it.)