In this article The Logo Creative discusses What To Include In a Great Graphic Design Portfolio
If your looking to secure a position with a design agency then you need to know combined with your CV, your portfolio will show the employer what your capable of. You need to think about every aspect of its construction and consider how a potential employer will view its potential.
You can create a portfolio in any format you like – some employers might be impressed with a video and others with a simply laid out PDF document. Whatever format you decide to create it in, you should take your time to plan out how you can effectively communicate and showcase your skills and completed project work. During your planning time you will need to consider:
- How your wanting to guide the prospective employer through the body of work?
- How will you communicate your design skills with the right amount of information?
- How much time and money do you have to create the portfolio?
Are you wanting to show a broad set of skills or more specific ones (the answer to this will largely depend on the job you are applying for as well as the employer’s specification?)
After you have worked out the above issues, we advise you go through the following processes:
- Look through your available projects you can add and try out different combinations– consider, with each combination, what this shows to your potential employer. You should ask a valued peer what they think of the different combinations as well. Remember there might be a whole design team looking through your portfolio – all with their varying critiques of certain bits of work. If you keep questioning one particular piece of work then remove it!
- You need to think how you want your portfolio to look – you do not want the portfolio to be more impressive than the actual work and it needs to look really smart. Think clean and simple use white space to draw attention to the portfolio pieces don’t over crowd your portfolio its about the work!.
- As mentioned above the design of your portfolio should not distract from the content – it should always be content driven!.
- Like a lot of good design in your industry – the design of your portfolio needs to appear simple. Using flash to show off your skills is not a good idea. It’s about COMMUNICATION!
- You should also have your portfolio available in different formats – print and web being the main ones. They should be consistent and complimentary.
- Prepare the portfolio in the same chronological order as shown in your CV, preferably in reverse order i.e. most recent projects first then backwards from there.
- For any portfolio you prepare to be sent electronically, avoid creating too large a document. No more that 6 Mb, otherwise the receiving server may reject it because of size.
We would advise that you need two types of portfolio. The first needs to be a shortened version of your main folio and be included in your CV/Portfolio combination document. This is known as a ‘teaser’ and should be designed to entice the viewer. The second portfolio type needs to be held back for face-to-face presentations and needs to be much more extensive in ‘look and feel’.
Here’s a few points on what we would look for:
- Great design portfolios need to show a compelling ‘design process’ from a project’s beginnings through to completion.
- It needs to ideally show rich ‘stories’ about people. Not the ‘consumer’, but the human being. Consider the language used by the world’s greatest designers and how they attempt to improve the world through good design.
- We would prefer to see folio’s that are clear, understandable and a pleasure to go through. Certainly think about how you might present this and this could be PDF, PowerPoint, web or a movie.
Overall, we are looking for great design which will inspire, excite and, most importantly, create interest from any prospective employer.
In the below videon Chris Do from The Futur Youtube channel answers some most asked questions designers have
- How do I get a job in graphic design?
- What do employers look for in a portfolio?
- How many pieces should I include?
- What should I show in my portfolio to get a job in graphic design?
Chris explains this is the most asked question he get’s. CSUN student asks and gets a surprising response. Chris Do facilitates the answer by asking more questions to help the student discover the answer for themselves.
