My Portfolio

This is my portfolio from last (spring) quarter of school. As I’m thinking about a new layout and a new portfolio with some new projects, it would be awesome to have some criticism to keep in mind! Thanks a lot. :slight_smile:

[url]http://www.uc.edu/propractice/ind_design/Vivian_Molly_07.pdf[/url]

Hope you don’t mind another student giving you comments.

Your project sequence does not follow the contents page. Furthermore you don’t have any call out in your sketch pages, I didn’t know what I was looking at.

It’s good to have a small project title somewhere in every page to help remind the view which project they are looking at.

I don’t know what is the nature of the intention of this portfolio, but I won’t put things like foundation work except for human figure/portraits. I also won’t include experiences like dog-sitting in your resume. Your design related experience should come first.

I can’t believe they are teaching 3D modeling before junior… kills the students’ creativity right away.

I’ll leave the rest to the rest.

Thanks, it’s good to have lots of opinions. I usually just get feedback from people that have seen my stuff all along in my studios.

Oh yeah, for clarification…

This portfolio was to get my first co-op job. I haven’t had any design experience before the job I have now. And I did notice that the contents page was off/not necessary, but my advisor never put my new version online. Oh well.

html it. i’ve noticed that ppl prefer html to pdf. its crossplatform as well. and you can easily revise it in case of precision targeting.

I don’t know how to do that. Hmm… we do the pdf format pretty much through school, but I can talk to my advisor in the fall about maybe changing how we do our digital portfolios. Thanks for the insight!

Although I did not attend UC myself, I get to review UC students’ portfolio where I work every quarter. Here are some suggestions:

  1. State clearly why your product is designed the way you did. Make sure it’s not just another soap, vacuum cleaner, or a fruit vessel… So you had a specific target user for your soap, explain what makes the design work for that specific user.

  2. Edit edit edit. You don’t have to show everything you have done. Many times, you will be judged by the weakest project in your portfolio. If it is not good, leave it out. Unless extremely well down, I would also leave out unrelated, non ID projects.

  3. Try expanding your projects. I have seen nice packaging designs coupled with the soap project or the hand tool project. Put the product in their environment, show users, etc.



    Good luck!

Just curious, what level are you now? That will help us know where you should be by now.

I agree with others…leave out the foundation stuff. Nobody is going to be impressed that you can glue a paper cube and a pyramid

You have the same problem as me I think…I’m always trying to show everything I got, and what I should be doing is to be more selective with my work. After a while it makes a portfolio unnecessary “long” and full of junk…I just have to learn to let it go and don’t hang onto every lousy sketch that I’ve done.

It does need a little bit more of explanatory text, too.

Good luck…takes a lot of changing and tweaking to get the portfolio more or less right.

Thanks for the comments! I am a “pre-junior” or third year technically I guess. I just finished my second year of school, but our first year wasn’t ID really. I’m on my first co-op job right now.

What version of acrobat are you using? I can’t seem to get the pdf to load properly (MS XP, mozillla or IE, acrobat version 5)

I’m pretty sure it should work it 5, I converted it a while ago, but I thought that I made it compatible with 4,5, and 6