WHAT DO WE WRITE
IN PORTFOLIOS
What do we write in our portfolios? Do we need to say anything or should we just let the work speak for itself?
Job name – what’s it called?
You’d be surprised how many people forget this. It’s hugely important for the client/employer to be able to mention a job they liked of yours – rather than “I really liked that one where you had the purple thing in the sky and that kinda cloud thing was sorting of spinning through the…” – it also gives them a quick second glance of what the job might be about so they can view the job with a more informed eye. In that case it’s probably important to name it something that makes sense rather than “job 01”.
Description – what is it?
This is obvious but all the more important for it. People don’t wont to look foolish by not knowing what something is so often they wont ask to save face and hope that you assume that they know what it is. Assume nothing, make it obvious, and make it quick. If someone can quickly glance down and read a description, they can then appreciate the visual so much more.
Concept – why do you do it?
This is also one of the more important ones. Often what makes us great designers is the way we work things out. Therefore it’s vital that we get those great ideas across. It’s no good having mountains of process work with some groundbreaking ideas if no one knows how much or what we did. Now I’m not saying you have to have everything in there but maybe a sentence or two explaining why you did what you did could be very helpful.
Brief – what did you have to do?
Sometimes it’s good to show what you were originally asked to do, especially if you went above and beyond the brief. Of course if you didn’t and just did what they asked (or broke the brief) then it might not be the best to show because it doesn’t add anything to your accomplishment.
Size – what impact does it have?
If there is something interesting about the size that your job was done at then you should put this in. If it was incredibly big or incredibly small, something that really made the design stand out. If of course it was just a normal size (magazine ad, letterhead etc.) and doesn’t add anything impressive then don’t put it in.
Materials – what did you use?
Again, put this in if it adds something to you design. If it doesn't then ignore it and miss it out.
Team – Who did you do it with?
This is always a tough one, if you worked in a team, even if you did all the work, the team gets the credit. What you can do is just show what you did within the team, but often this feels like half an assignment and might leave the viewer wondering where the rest is. Acknowledge you were in a team and live with it, if nothing else it shows that you know how to work in one. The problems of making it out that it was just you could be huge, especially if the next person for an interview was your team mate, and they plan on showing exactly the same piece.
Roll Out – What did it do?
Include this if something happened after you finished a job...like winning an award for the design, or a massive upturn in sales. If something extraordinary happened because of your design put this in.
Now remember with all this your use of typography should also play an important part, no 12pt type in a font that's unreadable. You want people to read this, and read it quickly, no novels. Put it on the page where it doesn't get in the way but still gets noticed.
Remember too much will get ignored.
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INSPIRATION & EXTRAS
Each week the lecturers throw up things we find that relate to what we've been discussing or working on that week. Sometimes it might be things that relate to your major assessment and sometimes just stuff that we thought was worth seeing. If you find something you think we should be showing or something we just have to see let us know in class or throw an email over to me at matt@billyblue.com.au and I'll get it up here or on the Bluni inspiration site.
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BIG TYPE IS BEAUTIFUL
This image is taken from a group of workshops held between Oct. 2007 — Feb. 2008 meant to teach the students a systematic approach to develop typefaces. A important part of the class were “quick type” exercises to achieve the knowledge of coherence between tool and form. In this exercise they were asked to quickly, in teams of two, design a number and make it bigger than they could comprehend at ground level. It's amazing they got the lines so straight. The course was put together by Philipp Herrmann in Zürich.
