How much work to include in your portfolio

QUANTITY, QUALITY AND VARIETY
In planing your portfolio, one of the first questions that arises is what to include? How much, and what mix of work? How does one go about selecting work for a portfolio? This question can be addressed (if not answered) in several ways: Quantity, Quality and Variety.

QUANTITY
Quantity is perhaps the easiest. Most professional designers surveyed for this book expressed the opinion that somewhere between 8 and 12 pieces of work are sufficient.
1. focus on the selected pieces and make sure they are impeccably worked and presented.
2. If you have not succeeded in impressing someone with the first eight pieces of work, four or five or ten pieces more are not going to make your case stronger.
3. Selecting fewer pieces allows the really strong work to stand out, not dragged down by work of lesser quality.

Judging quality of work is something you should not trust to yourself alone. Avoid the trap of including work for sentimental reasons, or –worse yet—because you worked so hard on it. The amount of time and effort you expended, or the degree of difficulty, are themselves not an indicator of quality. They may even work against you, especially if the nature of the job did not warrant that much time and effort. The best work seems often (seems) effortless. More effort does not improve a weak or flawed concept.

Example :
Design A: a modest solution to a modest problem: shows a good match of effort to budget and results.

Design B: a modest problem, but the solution involves a time-intensive and costly process. The work obviously took much longer to produce than would be billable for such a project. Such pieces can come across as self-indulgent on the part of the designer, and a potential employer might wonder, if they hired this person, would they end up turning little or no profit. The bottom line is, “will you be an asset to the company?”

That is not to say that some spectacular flights of fancy are out of place, but make sure they are recognized for what they are.

Letting Go is hard to do.
A conclusion one can arrive at from this might well be: spend a great deal of time practicing your craft— creating and discarding designs rapidly, so that the designs you do feel worth keeping, are executed with speed, sureness and elegance.

While a good project can be improved, some projects are doomed to mediocrity; due to in part to limitations inherent in the brief, your abilities at the time, or the nature of your proposed solution. No amount of work can correct these. It is better to let them go.

In these matters, an experienced advisor can help you judge whether the idea is worth reworking or whether it should be scrapped.

QUALITY

A second consideration for what to include is Quality. With regard to quality, there are seems little disagreement: The work should be all of superb quality. What passes for common wisdom (having been repeated often) is that a portfolio is judged on its weakest piece, since that indicates the range of your standards. If you are willing to accept the mediocre, to present work with a few flaws in a portfolio, then that is an indication of your standards, and so, by implication, the level of quality you would be willing to give to a client.

It is better, according to some designers, to show a few good pieces than to show more work, some of which declines in quality. Include enough to demonstrate that the good work is not an aberration, or that it was not the product of a particular collaboration, and you can sustain quality across a range of work. Eight to ten pieces are probably sufficient for this.

Time is another factor when it comes to portfolios. It is not uncommon for a design firm to receive two to three portfolios a day, and if they actually advertise a position, the number of applicants can be several hundred. So portfolios get looked at very quickly. Things that arrest the eye may get a longer look. If, at the end of the day, after you have left, the person with whom you interviewed can recall one piece of your work, you are lucky. If that person remembers that piece of work as one of the high-points of his or her day, you are well on your way to landing a job!


VARIETY
The third factor in deciding what to include in your portfolio is variety.

As in any design situation, place yourself in the position of the viewer. Pretend you are a designer/art director looking at a prospective employee’s portfolio. (In a classroom setting this can be done as a role-playing exercise. Otherwise, try to imagine yourself in the role of the interviewer). You are in a hurry—meetings, deadlines, etc.—and a person visits unannounced with a portfolio. Your desk is not clean, so you lay the portfolio out on top of other things. Or you go into to a conference room with a large table and you open the portfolio. Most likely you will flip through it to get an overview. Does the first piece you see arrest your eye? Then does the second spread present another aspect of the individual? Are you AS engaged as you were on the first page? Or is it more of the same. Is the third page more of the same or is it something surprising that keeps you looking — do you look at your watch?

Here is where you would really like to see something surprising. If the next page has some humor, something different, something to suggest that there is more ahead that is of interest, you will continue. If not, you will take the measure of what you have seen so far. Perhaps you will politely flip through the rest of the portfolio, hoping for something new, but having already made a decision that this person is not the most qualified, that first impression will be hard to dispel.

Since you are limited to a few pieces of work in your portfolio, you want each piece to show as much as possible. Redundancies are a waste of space and tend to lessen the impact of your portfolio. There are exceptions, but a general rule that I recommend is to select work that shows specific skills or conceptual solutions. This can apply to techniques, formats and concepts.

Of course, the value of diversity within your portfolio will vary depending on your objectives. Tt should be noted that the above advice is directed toward preparing an entry-level design portfolio.

(Exceptions include application to graduate programs. For example, a student applying to graduate school should show a consistent and focused body of work. A few extended projects will be well-received, since often in graduate school you will be expected to carry out extended work. In contrast, if you are applying to an advertising agency or design firm, especially one that has a diverse client base, demonstrating that you can handle a variety of work is an advantage.)

literate design – The structure and meaning of the text

Recently a senior design student stated that he was unaware that his design projects were being graded both on content and on form—the he assumed that the actual verbal content did not matter. After I picked my jaw up from the floor, I tried to explain that we have always taken the position that design is essentially about problem-solving. And visual communication design involves knowing what it is that one is communicating.

In many conversations with art directors in researching an upcoming textbook, many have indicated that they are looking for someone with strong verbal, organizational, and visual skills. Writing is a vital component of both multimedia and graphic communications. Lance Rutter (of Tanagram, Chicago) underscored that a few weeks ago in saying he was interested in “literate” designers.

True, most production work requires that the designer merely follow the given copy; however anything higher and more creative—especially where the designer expects to be a participant in the decision-making process—requires that the designer pay attention to the connection of word and image in service of solving the design problem.

Four-year design programs, such as the one at Bradley aim to turn out thinking designers who have the potential to be art directors or creative directors, or heads of design firms. Highest marks go to those who creatively solve problems. Graphic designers work with words every day; and many hours are spent adjusting spacing, hierarchy, placement, etc, so the design reinforces the structure and meaning of the text.