IDD 480 - Print Portfolios

While my intentions of a print version of my portfolio are not at the top of my priority list. I did take trip over to Hull's Art Supply in New Haven to see what types of ways I could bind a print portfolio when I actually have time to get around to it. Unfortunately, my options are quite pricey for what I would consider just a fancy binder. Although, after reading in the book, I found that there are other options to creating a portfolio and packaging it in a nice neat way without it being expensive. Portfolios ranged from about $35 to several hundred dollars. Perhaps when I am no longer a student and am making very fine work I'll display it in an expensive portfolio.

Some of the ways I saw portfolios displayed in the book included cloth boxes, magazine holders, metal boxes, bound books, a variety of objects in a FedEx box., a suitcase made from cut-up coffee cans, and clever ways of packaging everything into a unique folder. The variety of objects in the FedEx box struck my interest. This was created by Modern Dog, a design group from Seattle. A couple of the items actually contained in it was a breath spray called, "The Original Liar" and a package of gum called, "Be Nice Or Leave Gum." The effect this had on me from just looking at the photographs on the book was quite interesting and definitely grabbed my attention. Now some of the other items in the portfolio is borderline and might offend some people. This topic does get discussed in the 9th chapter of the Digital Portfolios book.

When selecting work for a portfolio, especially as a student, I feel it is important not to step off on the wrong foot. Modern Dog's portfolio is not for everyone. We need to keep in mind that we don't know what type of morals, ethnicity, race, etc. the person on the viewing end of the portfolio has.

Whether we are writing our resume or providing captions for the work in our portfolio, we need to write in an educated manner. Spelling, grammar, and typos need to be perfect. Bad writing will make anyone will look bad and it doesn't matter who they are. Humor, can be important, tricky, and dangerous. Humor needs to be safe because we don't know who will be viewing it at the end. To some, it could be hilarious, to others, it might offend and they could want nothing to do with you and your work after that. One last thing to consider is paying attention to the audience of the portfolio. Who is going to be viewing the portfolio? Or who is more likely to view it? Catering the text and the language to them and more of your true personality can be exposed.

IDD 480 - Creating Interactive Portfolios

Often times, the first thing a potential interviewer will do is visit a designer's website to take a look at their work. This gives them a quick and easy way to view the work at any time of the day or night. It also shows that a designer is serious about their work and eliminates a lot of barriers that are involved with sending print portfolios. A lot of successful design studios redesign their web sites as often as once a year to maintain their good reputation, stay current, and give a reason for visitors to come back to the web site.

For some designers, a web site is all that is needed, for others, it won't do the designer justice. Book designs, annual reports, and other things that might have heavy typography or a lot of pages to review aren't viewed that easily on a web site. The case where all a designer might need is a web site portfolio holds often true with interactive designers and photographers.

Motion graphic portfolios are often provided on VHS, CD, or DVD and vary in length. They usually have music that accompany them. Most are usually less than 1 minute in length but there is no magic number for length.

Motion can also be shown with stills such as with the traveling exhibit film called Logomotion. The concept of animation with the famous logos is quite evident and we are able to see how they would look in motion.

Another thing to consider when creating a motion graphic portfolio for the web is optimizing them for different formats so that there is a high level of cross-compatibility. Quicktime is the most common format that is used with designers. I, however, think that perhaps Flash with its new video encoder features may take over with its perhaps even higher probability of being installed on someones computer. Not to mention files are smaller and can load quicker, but some quality is lost. But down the road I think this could prove to be useful and I may even try implementing it as another option into my website.

IDD 480 - Presentation is Everything

If there is one thing we've all learned throughout our 4 years in this program, it should be that presentation is everything in this field. Whether we are presenting a print portfolio, walking into a job interview, talking on the phone, or sending a resume; our presentation of it, is very important.

When we present our design portfolio, everything down to the box we carry it in, needs to look good. When making a live presentation, we are the MC. We get to adjust and cater the presentation to our audience however we see will best benefit us. It could be lingering on specific works longer or going over other pieces quickly. We set the tempo and the rhythm. One thing to keep in mind about print portfolios or any portfolio for that matter, is not to show your best work first. Show a piece that will get them interested or engaged into the portfolio. From what I understand, I feel that a portfolio should build up to your best work, even though in this field, it is all a matter of opinion.

When going to a presentation, first impressions are everything, right down to whether or not your shoe is untied or not. Don't arrive 30 minutes early, but also don't arrive late. 5-10 Minutes early will be quite adequate to show punctuality. If you are going to be arriving late, call ahead to let them know, but if you are calling with a casual excuse such as you over slept. Don't even bother, you'll have already lost the job. During the presentation, as a new graduate, make sure not to discuss how a project was for a class, but rather point out why you enjoyed the project and what you learned from it.

This chapter was loaded with information. It has a long checklist for making both cold calls and resumes. For example, when making a cold call, keep the conversation polite, brief, and on track. Always leave on a positive amicable note. When making a resume, avoid type that is too small or too pale. Font should always be legible and don't follow a standardized resume format at the expense of good typography. It should look like a designer created it.

When creating a portfolio, also take the time to go back over the work and clean it up. Get rid of any artifacts, adjust the color levels, and fix typography.

IDD 480 - Building a Design Portfolio

This week we started reading another book from our collection titled Building Design Portfolios by Sara Eisenman. The first chapter started to be just a bit overwhelming. The amount of varieties of portfolio cases and ways to present a portfolio are a bit overwhelming. Especially with the amount of wonderful portfolios shown in this book. Here are some of the things I managed to get out of this while being overwhelmed and hopefully it will slowly break down the process for me.

Tone - it is the overall feel for your portfolio depending on your design goals. For example, if you want to design corporate work, it should be an elegant and formal portfolio suited for the audience.

Range - After the tone is determined, it is important to show a variety of design work in the portfolio to show you as a well rounded designer.

There are many different formats for portfolios. Some of the one formats I will be covering for mine will be a web site, a DVD, and a demo reel. The concept of a portfolio in a book format is also a nice way to display your work in a professionally bound way. The design of the book also becomes an added piece to your portfolio collection. Another important thing to show is your design process and how you derived at your final design. Although in one of my readings, it was suggested that this section be removable and shown at the request of the portfolio viewer. Flexible content is also another suggestion to keep in mind depending on who views the portfolio. Being able to rearrange and adjust content make portfolios very versatile in gaining clients or jobs.

Along with different formats, there are tons of different types of ways that the portfolio can be presented. Packages range from bookcase portfolios to aluminum presentation cases. After the case is chosen, the presentation inside counts just as much. Materials inside need to be secure with enough room. Foam core and mat board can be used to display the artwork.

Our other reading included a lot of information about digitizing artwork. The most relevant information to me will pertain to photographing a couple of objects as well as scanning photographs. When photographing objects, make sure to have enough light and the proper light so it doesn't change the color of the objects and eliminates shadows. When scanning objects, scan in mind with the final touched up image being about 400 pixels wide. Take the time to touch up and make sure that everything is level and square in Photoshop.

IDD 480 - Creative & Organized

Do those two things run together? Well, perhaps with a little practice they will in my world. All design jobs that start in the creative process have some sort of design brief. They can come in many different varieties. Whether it is written, verbal, just a picture, etc. It can be given to you from the client themselves or it can be written up your own. Not having a design brief makes the designer vulnerable to the client. My favorite line out of this entire reading is: "Graphic designers need briefs. In fact, although designers constantly demand freedom, the really crave constraint. It's a little recognized fact, but designers are only happy when they are battling with restraints."

Before starting a job, designers often sit down and go through a pile of books, magazines, and the internet scouring for ideas. An important aspect of being a designer is having cultural awareness. Clients also like to have designs better than their competitors and urge the designer to study their work as well.

Typography, typography, typography, infact that can't be said enough. Unfortunately, it is one of the tougher areas to master in graphic design. OurType has one of the most intersting ways of displaying different fonts to purchase on their website. The typography of it is so intersting that you get sucked into reading the different phrases that the different type layouts use. In fact, I almost forgot that I could purchase some of those fonts that they displayed.

The design process for everyone is different. Some people like to dive right into working on the computer. Often times I like to make simple sketches to give myself something to go by and then go to a computer screen. One very important thing to do in the design process is to look at the work from a distance, which is hard to do when it is on a computer screen. So if possible, print it out, put it on the refridgerator, and then look at it up there for a couple of days. Of course this assuming that designers have a lot of time...which we all know that we don't. In that case, we can just put it on the refriderator, step back, and avoid leaving it up there for days.

In the chatper in Baron's book, she discusses ways to organize your work. A lot of it is common sense that is pointed out to us and being smart about storing and backing up work. The five main disciplines to organizing files are: Group, Name, Show, Weed, Backup. The two that didn't stand out to me after first glance were Weed and Show. Show just means to use thumbnails to catalog our work, since we are primarily visual people. Custom folder icons can help with this. Weed means getting rid of things that aren't needed. Put process ideas in their own folder and throw out any error files. Make sure to dot his while the project is still fresh in your mind. The last thing I can say is.... Backup...backup....backup.... While I do have backups of my current work, I can't access them at the moment because I didn't make enough backups. Such as back up to a CD instead of just another hard drive.

IDD 480 - I can't think of a good title

In this weeks Shaughnessy's reading, we read about dealing with clients and self-promotion. Dealing with clients is more familiar to me in the pseudo-design studio setting from when I personally dealt with clients while I worked at a sign shop. Keeping clients (happy) and developing new clients is usually what happened while I was working there. In fact most of our business came from repeat customers. The book talks about 'first job syndrome,' which I can't say I ever saw first hand, that happen to us. Although, now that I think about it, there were some clients that were a little more difficult and demanding than others. Usually they didn't understand the wait time involved and wanted immediate products, just as if they had gone into Wal-Mart and PRESTO there sign was all done the next day.

Developing new clients was always important in that business. Luckily, the company I worked for was one of the few in the area and benefited from the "Location, location, location" aspect of business. By default, most people came to that company because it was one of the few in the area. I did witness my boss maintaining communication with clients that had not requested any new business from us to generate work. In the beginning, my boss said that he would actively attempt to develop new clients by going out and looking for work. He would create signs for smaller businesses that needed signage.

In Baron's reading, she talks about the different formats for a portfolio. She starts by talking about portable media. The first topic almost made me laugh as she gave a short paragraph about Zip disks. I haven't heard of people using zip disks in years! I guess, however, that some people still use them for storage and wanted to make it clear not to use them for making a portfolio portable. Out of all of the mediums she discussed, I believe that it is safe to say that CDs, DVDs, websites, and perhaps a laptop (if absolutely required) are acceptable mediums for a portable portfolio. If creating a demo reel, I would make sure that it is easy to create a VHS tape on the fly if that format is requested, but I would not to waste the time in converting an entire demo reel to VHS tape in the beginning. DVD players are probably at this point more common than VCRs are since they come on just about every computer these days.

The book also mentions the site Sharpe Online and after visiting it, I encountered that it has changed since the book was published. In fact, each associate no longer has their own personal feel to their portfolio and they all follow the same format now. This could possibly be a sign of the company changing and perhaps changing internally or even growing since the associate list is longer than the original 7 and some names are no longer there.

IDD 480 - I'm the next CEO

Okay, so maybe I'm not the next CEO of a design studio. Perhaps I will be down the road, but in the process of learning how to run a design studio; I have learned how they operate and now have a general idea of what it might be like in a design studio and what they are looking for in new employees. "The secret of success in running a design company is treating the people like gods." and "Always employ people who are better than you." Those two lines stood out to me. The first one makes perfect sense, employees should be treated well so they have a high morale, make good work, and hopefully stay for a while. But the second line made me think at first glance. Why would a company want to higher someone better than them? And if that's the case...I'm never going to get hired!! Well, it got explained why they would hire someone better than themselves in the reading, and I've determined that I have a lot of work ahead of me. Also discussed in that chapter was the different staff that comes with a design studio and when in general it is needed (depending on the size of the studio).

Graphic design is every where and the demand for it is constantly expanding (unless the economy isn't doing well). The book mentions signs that were neatly designed on a hiking trail in the woods. I for one, can testify that signs end up everywhere and are just as neatly designed since I have spent the last three years working for a sign shop. Typography is especially important when it comes to signs. They need to be legible, easy to read, and often from a distance. Finding work can be hard work. Utilizing one's contacts and creating a database of clients is very important. One way to obtain clients is to target companies and institutions that need design help.

When it comes time to displaying your work, it doesn't need to be in a typical black portfolio case. Today they can be in several different media forms. I, however, will hopefully have several different forms that I can use to display my portfolio. When I design my portfolio I'm going to attempt and cater it to the audience that I think will be viewing it the most. Which at the moment is potential employers. I think I'm going to go for an overall simple look to show my work. When thinking about the audience, thinking about specific companies and organizations that I would want to work for come to mind. At the moment, being a soon-to-be graduate, I'll work for almost anyone and go almost anywhere. I do have a particular type of design I would like to be doing, so that is going to narrow my search down.

One chapter said to exhaust your personal contacts when trying to find a job. So in that case, does anyone know someone that might want to potentially hire me out of school? Some places to look for other professionals in our area would be the local chapters of the AIGA. The Boston and New York chapters are probably our best bet.