Mike and Richard,
Thanks for the quick responses. I appreciate the compliments. Mike and I have known each other (in person) for a long time… and the sad thing in design school was really, really sad. Moving on.
I definitely agree that everything is too wordy. I tend to work in a way that starts with alot of words that eventually get culled down. Over the next few days I’ll start working on that process. Ironically, for an in person presentation, I don’t need many words on the page to give a good presentation. I have had a tendency to ramble in the past(Mike may remember), but I’ve gotten much better at it over the years. This is more of a pre-interview tool. I need it to illustrate the key points without being there to answer questions.
Mike, I’ll definitely see what I can do to illustrate why the selected concepts were chosen, as opposed to just saying that they were. I tried to do that with some of the copy, but I’ll work to streamline it.
Richard, do you think separating the development of each individual product would help clarify the process? The path from initial concept to final project was much less linear than I’m used to. Product design was just one element of the project and in many cases decisions about the products were informed by the other parts of the project. For example, the decision around funding basically caused us to scrap(at least temporarily) four products, develop one further, and create two new concepts.
I definitely have alot of intermediate work from the bag project. I’ll see what I have from the adi project, but it may also be a matter of better sketch presentation. I was working on both of these projects simultaneously(The bag was my 3 semester master’s thesis and the adidas project was a one semester project), and because of the scope of the adi project, I’m not sure I have as much developmental work as I would like.
While I will cut down on the copy, do you think the team page is necessary in the bag project? If not, do you have any suggestions regarding how to show the scope of my work? I did a large portion of the product design work, but also provided strategic leadership in all areas of the project. If I remove the “title pages” between the sections of the project, how would you suggest making the transitions? Should I just go right from a product to a trade show booth, for example?
Again, I appreciate the feedback. Over the next few days I will work towards implementing the changes. In many cases, it was the same thing I was thinking. This was the first draft of these projects. I had an interview this morning and I needed something to show.
As always, I would love any additional feedback both from the two of you and from others. Hopefully I will post an updated version by the beginning of next week,I have to spend some time this weekend on the next steps for the bag project now that we are going to production.
Thanks again.
Patrick