Hey everyone,
I’ve just made my Eng Design Portfolio so I can apply for undergraduate internships and I’m worried it’s too wordy (even for an eng portfolio). I can’t really make pretty Illustrator pictures, but I guess that’s not the role of a Engineer anyways.
Anyone got any feedback?
Here’s the link:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9735864/Eng%20Portfolio.pdf
By the way, I’ve removed my best piece, as I’d like to commercialise it and it hasn’t got any IP protection, but its layout is pretty much the same as the rest.
Thanks in advance!
“If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter”
Maybe you could make it less of a running narrative and use bullet points here and there- The fall-back of most engineers…
I’d use a less utilitarian font too- At the risk of sounding uncharitable, it looks a bit like sketchy desktop publishing, so a bit more love with font, size and spacing.
The PDF is over 12.5 Mb and some corporate inboxes gag on less than that. Maybe reduce image resolutions a bit before converting to PDF?
For an engineering book its pretty good. I get the sense that there’s a lot of good work in there, without studying it in detail. I don’t often look at engineering portfolios; engineering grads usually don’t take the slightest time to do anything but print out a SolidWorks assembly on a laser printer.
Your book should be able to tell a story with a minimum of reading, using images, brief copy, and white-space to direct attention.
Your intro pages - like 3, 8, 13 - feel like a better mix of copy and image. The content pages are yes, too wordy. You can find a graphic designer to help with basic layout and font usage. For example page four is a mess. There’s some saying about “if you have to use arrows your graphic design has failed”. Get rid of all the boxes, the arrows, and type coming from different directions.
You have a lot of compelling images - I might suggest leveraging those images more, and incorporating copy into those images in a tasteful way (e.g. not in a brightly colored box, one font size).
Thanks for the Advice! I’ve updated everything with your suggestions…
I dumped the Caslon pro font and just used the Univers font the whole way through. I also got rid of all the boxes with arrows and merged that into some photos and other text boxes. The arrows were supposed to be engineering dimensions, but obviously that wasn’t coming across and just looked tacky.
I noticed the file size was a bit large, but I was worried about the images getting covered in artefacts. Guess I’ll just have to find the happy medium. What’s the sort of maximum acceptable file size I should be aiming for?
Cool projects! I’d would definitely buy the lamp. Good bulb choice.
Beware of word spacing and leaving a single word line dangling under a paragraph – widows and orphans can be distracting or they can be overlooked entirely.
Thanks man! I’ve actually got a design store here in Melbourne that’s interested in selling the lamp, so you never know!
That thing about orphan’s and widows never even occurred to me, but now you point it out it makes a lot of sense. I went through all of my text, and there weren’t any widows that I could find, but there were heaps of orphans. I’ve managed to fix most of them up simply by adding or removing a word here or there and it looks a fair bit cleaner 