Critique my portfolio?

Hey guys,

I’ve always found this was a great place for a critique. Any feedback or pointers on my folio would be of much help.

http://paulgibsondesign.com/Portfolio2012.pdf

Also, how is the best way to send your portfolio out and about? I normally make it an email attachment… however would a online pdf link like this one be welcome?

Thanks,
Paul

Paul, very nice visual story telling! I always click through portfolios at about 2-3 seconds per slide to see if I can understand the story and “get it” on an intuitive level. If I feel good about it, then I go back and actually look and read deeper. Yours holds up on both levels.

I’d like to see a little more. Right now you have two food based projects and an image of an app. This doesn’t give me a big enough sense of your capabilities unless you want to do CPG type work. I’d like to see a CE project, an accessory project, maybe a furniture project to really round it out. Some of these could be 1 pagers. Not everything has to be fully blown out. I think 2-4 full projects and 3-5 one pagers is a good mix.

I also think you could organically work in a couple of more refined drawings. A step between your great ideation sketches and CAD.

As far as distributing your work, I think a link to a PDF is fine as long as you state in the email “this link will take you to a xxMB PDF” so people are prepared.

Thanks Yo. I like the idea of a few one pagers, expanding my focus from some of my other projects.

Anyone else have any comments of feedback? I’d love to hear some more.

Paul,

Agreed with yo ^^ above. I would like to see the development sketches that really moved things forward to be more emphasized in the project. Everything in the portfolio seems to be at the same level of craft/commitment, which is the basis for some of my graphic design critique if you want to take a stab at improving that:

— Your CV/Resume could use some whitespace around the edges of the frame. It’s very close and feels cramped. Not everything is of the same importance and could be sized differently. The things on the left are important, the things on the right less so.

Make it easy on your viewer to read what they are inevitably going to go through quickly.

— That applies to the “tags” for the Brew project. Vertical type is rarely appropriate and it’s certainly not appropriate here. It looks out of place and is not easily readable. Use the color and background highlight to make it a quick read so that they can look at your content. This is really well done in your Prep section. It’s not bad in the “Innocent” section but the first few slides are missing it.

— I’m not feeling your character profiles. Since all of the brands have been cropped to the same squares they are not allowed their own voice. Those brands are powerful and you can leverage their popularity to speak for you more quickly. A lot of these large companies have PR images available. Use those when you can.

I hope that’s helpful. Best of luck.

-yssagul

Thanks Yssagul,

I like the points you’ve raised, some of the i’ve been playing with around a lot. I’ll have another shot!