George Yazbeck In narrowing down work to be presented in a portfolio site alongside a resume, what is a pattern you are seeing in choosing pieces? Who are you trying to attract?
Being a graphic design student with only a couple of courses away from completing this curriculum, I have been mindful of saving my previous assignments from my tenure to be used in a formal portfolio when applying for a design position or graduate school, etc. With that said, I already have made 2 drafts of my work thus far: one for applying to an internship and one for applying to a graduate program. For the former, I made an account with a site called portfoliobox to organize and showcase my work neatly and properly for any employer to review when applying for internships.
For the latter, I made an account with slideroom and only put out 20 of my best graphic design pieces for review as part of my graduate application. In both cases, I had an opportunity to sort out and narrow down my work based on whatever I could see fit. Personally I like to show progression, so I organized my work somewhat chronologically and sequentially based on theme (i.e. some pieces are about lines, some are about squares, etc.); concepts that are built through building blocks in applying what is learned to a more advanced area essentially. More importantly, both portfolios allowed for me to add descriptions on what each piece was supposed to be about or encompass in both subject and style attributes.
At this point, I have 54 pieces of graphic design work since beginning my major; as such, I had to eliminate certain pieces I thought did not capture my best work (mainly which were photos from my photography class that showed technical qualities like aperture but not artistic qualities like composition). As my collection of graphical output is still growing with 7 classes remaining in my major, I will never have to worry about not showing very little of my skill set derived from these pieces; however, the large amount of them do pose as a problem for portfolio length if one was to showcase everything (**now with this website, this is certainly the case, but my attitude has since changed – be prolific and showcase as much as you can).
When using slideroom, I had to limit my 54 pieces to 20; as a result, I easily took out pieces that were thematically too similar but at the same time, I had to omit pieces that I felt did not illustrate a range of my designs well enough even if design themes were different compositionally. This meant that a lot of my simplistic pieces (like from Microsoft Paint) had to go but more of my complex ones from Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign were kept. Overall, every design piece to date has been converted to the JPEG or PDF format and posted neatly on a slideshow to visually cater to accessibility throughout my portfolio as a whole.
Still, my current portfolio in full is rife with designs ranging from 2D to 3D, typography to illustration, web design to advertising design; the range in applications that graphic design serves is there. Admittedly, I do have to improve on my digital portfolio concerning portfoliobox by adding a strong first piece (for initial impression) and a strong last piece (for lasting impression) when applying for a career position. I will expect to do this upon completion of my degree. Also, I do need to expand on sections that require a resume and written excerpts to show experience and writing style respectively. I do have both but they need to be developed more. (**you can now probably tell that this website is largely a fully developed version of what I had wanted back in 2015).
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