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Five Steps to a Killer Portfolio
Five Steps to a Killer Portfolio
You've made it to that all-important job interview. Your portfolio is laid-out in all its glossy splendor. But instead of exclamations at your artistic brilliance, potential employers are only mildly impressed or worse yet, stifling yawns. What gives?
Luke Redd, a creative director with over 12 years experience, offers five tips that will make your visual portfolio for illustration, graphic design or photography blow the competition out of the water.
1. Kill Your Darlings
If it's good enough for Stephen King, it's good enough for you. As Luke advises, don't get too attached to your creative babies.
He once stubbornly included the "world's most poorly designed brochure" purely because he'd spent more than $200 of his hard-earned cash to make a good print. Interestingly, he also advises not to automatically include some of your best creations. They have to fit with the rest of your samples to achieve the overall effect of consistency and coherency.
2. Time for a Timeout
Give yourself some much needed distance. Sometimes all you need is a fresh pair of eyes to see your work more objectively.
For example, Luke explains going to the mat for "repulsive" magazine layouts, only to discover two days later that he needed to rethink his original design. Likewise, he struggled with a logo design until he took a breather and realized that actually, this was exactly the right direction.
3. Variety is the Spice of Life
Luke remembers how his first portfolio over-flowed with the themes of "dead rock musicians and spooky television shows." Which is great, if he was looking to design The Adams Family action figures, or produce posters for The Doors cover bands, but really limiting if he wanted to do anything outside his interests.
Make sure your portfolio includes a variety of projects that demonstrate your ability to handle a wide range of subject matters. Don't make your future employer work too hard to imagine how you can produce beautiful designs that will sell their unique widgets.
4. Keep it Current
As you progress through your career, you'll slowly build your body of work. So don't do as one job applicant did to Luke and use 30-year-old samples. Keep your portfolio current with samples of your most recent work. And don't take away from the impact of each piece by including more than 10 to 15 examples. Quality and relevance should be your main criteria for including a piece.
5. Artist's Intuition
As George Orwell says in his last rule of writing—"break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous." In other words, trust your intuition, be honest about the quality and relevance of your work, and take calculated risks to stand out in a sea of job applicants.
If you're interested in reading more thoughts from Luke about creating the killer portfolio, read his article here.
Top five ways to build a visual portfolio that gets you hired
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