Junior Portfolio Feedback

I am getting ready to revamp my portfolio again and am looking for any feedback about what I can improve. Thanks in advance!

My portfolio can be viewed here: ELCE | Home Page | University of Cincinnati

Hi Pritchre,

For me, your online pdf took a while to load - try resizing the file for a quicker loading time.

On first look, I quite like the ‘punch’ and impact of your layout, graphic and use of full page images throughout… however i would pull it back a little. Don’t be scared of white space.

I’d also look where you could ‘trim the fat’ on the number of pages and text. Do you need an contents page of a portfolio of 3 projects?
The ‘Harmony’ project could do with tightening and reducing the number of pages, some of which could be combine. 21 pages on 1 project is too much.

Your last project for me is the strongest. It is simply told and I can tell every pages purpose. What I am missing in your portfolio is some prototyping or sketch models and this project would be perfect for it. Even just a nice picture of a range of different card models you tested to furthered your thinking and final design, it needn’t be fancy.

Good start! I look forward to an update

Agreed about the last project. I think it’s the strongest in several ways. Great problem to solve and a great solution.

Thanks paulgibson and yssagul

I didn’t realize that it was loading so slowly. Thanks for letting me know! If employers are looking at it I really need to make sure that it loads quickly. I’ll have to play around with the pdf export setting to see if I can fix that.

I agree about the white space and “trimming the fat.” I think there are a lot of unnecessary pages. Like you said I think I’ll try to condense the Ishinomaki playground project. I’ll also try to add some more sketch modeling and prototyping. That really is completely lacking in my portfolio right now.

Thank you for the great advice!

Hey Rance!!

Looks great!! In addition to what other people have said (especially trimming down the playground project a bit)-

  1. shrink the description text on most pages. I think this will help with the lack of white space and make things feel even more organized.

  2. The harmony logo is a little much- I think the outside circles are too distracting. Maybe just using the word harmony with the “o” treatment is enough?

  3. on the market page for the backpack project- i think you can get rid of the black outline of the circle, and then maybe use a second color for one of the sectors? If the middle color gets dark enough from the overlap, it might even look relaly nice if the question mark was white!

  4. the “adaptpack” render page could use some descriptive text- even though the next page has more details, it just seems like the page could use some explanations of details or something.

  5. “how it works” page is missing a page number

  6. On the “what are the issues page” for the card project, the bottom row of boxes don’t have a top line and there’s no page number.

  7. if you’re going to use page numbers, choose the type of pages not to include and be consistent about it (like no page numbers on sketch pages or something). Right now it’s a little random which pages have it and dont have it. (you might have to adjust the rest of the layout or something, but it’s worth it for the consistency)

I know those are mostly minor things, but overall, its really really nice!

Hi Pritchre,

I agree with the other posts here, especially on the advantage of making simple “works-like” models for the backpack and card table concepts. I could see a simple model being really compelling for “Harmony,” even if it is less about ergonomics and handheld use than the other projects.

As a kid, I would have loved the music making tools that you included in Harmony (heck, I still would…)!

Thanks Jon and Robbie_roy!

This has been really good, I have a much better idea of where to go from here. Thanks for all the great advice!

Hey Pritchre ^.^

I’m popping in kind of late but I hope it’s not too late to give feedback?

First off I think your portfolio looks really nice. The underlying grid works, as do the bleed pictures and over-layed text. I do however agree with most people here that your graphic treatment is VERY loud. Your text is so large that it appears as shouting (which works for titles, but not so much for paragraph text) I also think you need to make your text more consistent. This might not be the case but it seems like sometimes you change the size, change the boldness etc. Pick three sizes and stick to them throughout the portfolio, it will make it feel much more unified.

Also, I really liked your ideation sketches in the backpack project, and thought they were actually much better then your final render. I think you could stand to take another stab at that, and you might even want to build it in CAD since you dont really have any projects that show off CAD skills yet but you post it under your skills.

Everything else has already been mentioned by above.

It is already looking great! Now it just needs some cleaning up :slight_smile: