Please review my first draft

Hello! I’m new to the core 77 community. I am a junior at Philadelphia University in Industrial Design. I have just completed the first draft to one project in my new portfolio and am looking for some feedback. This is a layout that I have never tried before so I would love some constructive criticism.

Thank you all!

https://static.squarespace.com/static/5310ba87e4b0d21c5299d5c9/t/5453b93de4b00bc43ee6b8c6/1414773053258/JUNIOR%20YEAR%20PORTFOLIO%20example%201.pdf

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Thank You KenoLeon, I appreciate it. I am abroad in Italy right now so it is much harder for me to get feedback from my professors at the moment. But I will keep refining and try to get in contact with them.

Thanks again
-Renee

Quick comments:

Consider less text and more emphasis on content. All that text is OK if you only ever going to present in person, but sending it out. Is overwhelming. I’m not going to read it. There is no visual flow on what im suppose to read first then second then 3rd.

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

Distill everything on a page down to what you want that page to say and focus everything on that. If it doesn’t contribute to that message then put it on another page.

Write down what you want each page to say and come back to that statement every time you look at the page. Don’t be afraid to use a lot of pages.

Example:

Page 1: Problem Statement. WHY your doing this.
Page 2. Breakdown of whats wrong with current system, what your going to try and fix.
Page 3. What we want to address and fix (will make a better X Y Z )
Page 4. Exploration in sketches, models or prortypes of X Y Z (emphasis on showing how they are solving those problems)
Page 5. New system money shot (introduce your solution)
Page 6. Features of new system(call out all the advancements you made)
Page 7. User flow of setting up new system (how does this work from beignning to end)
Page 8. Last Money shot (the face of the product and how you want this to be remembered by the viewer)

Story, Story, Story. If you were going to present this in person as a TED talk how would you do it? See Saw water treatment for Africa. Can make for a powerful narrative, but your presenting it like a research paper. Romance it a bit.

Hi Renee,

While I don’t have a ‘portfolio’, just some images on behance, coroflot; and am maybe not the expert on this, I do have a few comments.

  1. Graphic design is hard. That’s why we pay graphic designers to do it. I think you need to strip everything back and go easy on the fades, overlays and text effects. There are many things you can learn from graphic design blogs, forums and graphic designer’s portfolios. Don’t copy but get inspired

  2. In your contents page, you have thumbnails of project 3 and 4, but none for project 1 and 2. I think either have images for all or none.

  3. Your colour scheme and fonts need to be revisited. Check out Bengt Brummer’s tumblr for inspiration http://benbentobox.tumblr.com/. There’s nothing cooler than well designed graphics with a distinct and direct vision.

  4. Pick your best work and bring it to the front. It’s ok to have a few rough sketches but don’t fill the whole background with them. If something isn’t 100% what you want, you can redo it.

I agree, Graphic design is hard. I remember one project in school the first time we were judged on presentation, I spent more time tinkering with font sizes and layout than I did designing the actual product!

I have a Pinterest board where I collect various good examples of how other designers showcase their process that you might find useful. Note theres minimal text and nice big images. http://uk.pinterest.com/davidbulldesign/job-search/

Also at the beginning (bottom) of the board theres some more graphics stuff. Theres one Pin in particular about combining fonts - at the moment I feel you’re using far too many different fonts, at different sizes and that don’t compliment each other.

I may be wrong, but that photo on the second page looks like it was taken in the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. While it’s a great photo, maybe it would be more appropriate to find one from a less sombre setting?