Employers Interested--until they see portfolio

I am a senior engineering student who has gained a strong interest in user experience/interaction design. Unfortunately, I have limited design and art experience, which is demonstrated in my portfolio. If you were an employer glancing over my work, what would you like to see? In what ways can I enhance my portfolio? Lastly, are there similar artists/designers that I should research for inspiration?


My portfolio is @ this link:

Thanks in advance for your time!

-beaniebabie

first, stop using slideshare it sucks, make a dedicated pdf to show employers
two, use one simple typeface and stick with it.
three, reduce the workding and increase the images, show dont tell
four, but a book on grids find one and use it ( the layout book)
Five, show more of your thinking process ( initial sketches, brainstorming, inspiration, prototypes etc) Show people you are a smart thinking human being behind the images


Good luck


ps you straighedge?

How do you navigate this slide-share thing?!

Wow, it’s terrible…

@xbeaniebabiex- Take a look at bepster’s site. Great simple design, easy navigation filled with great work. Thats what s most important make the user focus on your work not the bad interface

Hey all,

thanks for the feedback! I uploaded the portfolio to slideshare specifically for this post. I usually submit a digital copy (.pdf) to employers.

@Stay youth: Your comments were very helpful!

ohhh, for some reason the controls did not show up in Chrome… tried it in Safari and now I can flip through it.
Crazy.

I concur with Stay Youth, use another website to show your work. Sending out a PDF is fine but having at least a taste of your work online is a big plus!
I did it in Indexhibit, easy enough but you could also use Coroflot for even easier maintenance.

If you are a senior engineering student, why does your portfolio say “sculpture meets design thinking”?

It’s hard to see from your portfolio what type of work you are trying to get.

In your first image, I don’t think that is actually a monoprint/monotype.

Regardless, unless you are applying to a studio art residency or graduate school, these don’t need to be in here. Are you looking for Ix/Ux work? Lead with the CEO empathy project, and have more than one page about it.

Your mindmap needs more mapping, more connections you barely have two steps from the center, even if the project is over, if you want this in your portfolio, there needs to be more to it, and it needs to be inside of a page that talks about why you made a mindmap, and what you gained from it.

Cafeteria takeout is a good example of what you need to fix. You are giving only the solution, but not an hint of the problem. An employer wants to see that you can use a repeatable and adaptable process to arrive at solutions that he or she agrees with (because they are a person and think that their way is the best way…) By only giving the solution, the employer, looking at your portfolio, thinks to themselves, I don’t know what the question was, so how can I know that the answer is correct.

Don’t say aesthetically-pleasing, it has no meaning. It’s like saying, “I want my object to be unoffensive to all senses.” What about exciting, or any of the other emotions we have as people, pleasing is like no emotion.

your bar graph and pie chart say the same thing, and if they don’t it’s too small to tell. Talk about what you learned from the data, not the data itself. Don’t pretend to be a statistician.

Is inhaler spelled incorrectly?

Redraw the sketch, it’s ok to trace and use circle guides.

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the impinger is not aesthetically pleasing, it looks like a strange bug cocoon. You should remove that comment because it discredits you as someone who can discern and create interesting forms from ones that have negative visual connotations. It give me a negative impression of level of taste.

I don’t want you to take these comments personally and feel hurt. I’ve typed this all up because I think you’ve just done a bad job of communicating your talent, not because I think you don’t have any.

You need to sit down and make two lists, first make a list of what you are good at, what did you learn to do in engineering school? Ask your professors to help you identify this.

Then make a list of what you want to do, look at job postings that you would want, and see what they want to see. Then compare lists, if there is no match-up at all, then you probably need to make better lists and try again.

Then when you have things match up, put documentation of those things in your portfolio.

Don’t worry about not being a graphic designer, 90% of industrial designers are convinced they are doing a passable job at graphic design, but they (we) really aren’t. Just line things up in columns, use only one or two basic typefaces, in fact use a san-serif typeface for headers like arial, or helvetica, and don’t bold it, just make it 14 pt and use a serif typeface for your text, like garamond or hoeffler, or even times if you have to in 10 pt.

DON’T USE ANY DISPLAY FONTS / TYPEFACES! lol anything you think would look cool on a poster really big should be avoided.

Maybe use an odd number of columns, like 3 or 5.

Good luck!