Major Project Work

Showcase portfolios
1

Hi All,

It would be great to get some feedback on my portfolio work. I have just graduated studying Product Design and Manufacture at the University of Nottingham. At the minute I’ve just put up work from my major project , the rest is on its way. Just like many others I am beginning to approach companies and would like everyone’s opinions on the work, layout etc

I look forward to hearing from you all

Jack

2

First off: proofread! The very first sentence of the very first page “personal” is spelled “pesonal”. “Intergrated” later on.

This may seem overly harsh, especially coming from someone who’s still in school, so please forgive any impudence.

  1. Where’s the story? This seems like a redesign of a headphone that’s purely aesthetic. Sure, you had pages showing how the headphones work, but I’m pretty sure that style /function of headphone is out there. What makes this new? Why did these headphones need to be designed? You made it very clear that you designed for manufacturing. Great. What else? Where’s the context? Who’s this for? Just saying “merging market of fashion and industrial design” doesn’t cut it.
  2. Too much text, man. I really don’t want to read all of that. Cut down on the text and tell a compelling story. Piezoelectric film driver: cool but what does that mean? You gotta make it so regular joes can understand what’s going on. Lowest common denominator is a safe bet, especially when you’re communicating anything (from a speech to a presentation board).

If I were to approach this, I’d start off with why this product should exist, tell a story about the user, why he needs this portable piezoelectric retro styled headphone. What’s the rationale for those characteristics (break it down)? Then I’d move on to development. You show a lot of sketches, but theres little explanation to what you’re exploring in those sketches. A simple caption would suffice. “Exploring folding mechanism”.

And that quote at the beginning’s really not working for me. Comes off as corny, especially contrasted to the way the rest of the presentation is so formal.

Looks like it could be a bomb project, but I don’t know because I couldn’t really get myself into reading it. There was no human element in there for me to connect to.

3

Thanks very much for the feedback, its great to see the project through fresh eyes. You’ve given a lot of pointers which I will work into the portfolio.

From my side, the project was to provide high quality music in a portable system which is only currently possible from very large and expensive audio hi-fi systems. Using piezoelectric technology was another focus of the project, there are only 3 headphones which have ever used this technology.

I guess its back to the drawing board lol

Cheers

Jack

4

See that helps your case a lot! But you’re still missing the human side. Context is everything.

5

Okey dokey, I’ve had a re-think and a re-do. I’ve tried to explain the project better than before.

Again any feedback would be great,


Jack