Portfolio Feedback, Please

Showcase portfolios
1

I am sending this out to a company who has expressed interested, any feedback would be greatly appreiciated!

Also I have a work sample video on youtube

Should I include the video link in the cover letter?


Any critizism is appreciated - successes and opportunities.

thanks for looking

nick

2
  1. Your icons for your projects all look the same: really low contrast, unintelligible gross dark green on grey faux-iphone icon. Scrap the icon or make it high contrast (black and white) and ditch the web 2.0 look.
  2. That skill map thing? That belongs on baseball cards and video games. Looks cool but is hard to read.
  3. PROOFREAD. “pyschological” on the 3rd page. Read everything out loud. The first sentence “when talking personal information” isn’t grammatically correct. I could go on…
  4. I don’t get the first project. Is this for use while travel? You speak highly of your “people centric design” skills, yet I can’t even tell what the context of use of the first project is. What is the current scenario? What are you proposing?
  5. 2nd project… again I have no idea what the final product is or does. This time I have a better view of the scenario, but… how is this people centric? You just eliminated a ton of trunk space.
  6. The bike project was the most well done (so far anyway). I got a good view of what’s there and what sucks about it (although again, you really need to proofread. It seems like you wrote everything in one go at 4AM), as well as the solution you’re proposing (this time you spec’d out what was what, which you didn’t do on any other).

Overall: you really skimp on process. Dumping a collage of sketches → models → renderings is not a good overview of your process. Cool, you can do them, but so can every other ID grad. What employers want to see is how you think. Your folio does NOT show this to me. You just say “more research was done to enrich the story”. What does that even mean?

The video is okay. It does a better job of explaining the bike project, but the others are either too fast, or you spend too much time on the inspiration (the zulu shoes). Music’s also kind of annoying.

3

Like tarng said, I would proofread a lot of the text, especially the ones in the top left corner, it seems most of them aren’t even sentences at all.

As for working with what you have, I would re-do the pages with a consistent content layout (introduction-> what problem you’re solving-> research, etc). I feel like I’m being dropped halfway through each project and you’re taking off before I’ve seen any sort of solution.

4

Thanks for the feedback!
When working on something for a week straight you kind of get too focused on certain things and can’t see the bigger picture. I appologize for the text, I was more focused on the story I am trying to tell.
As far as jumping through the projects, the idea was to show a part of the process in each project, which from the sounds of it, was unsuccessful. I’m reworking and will repost .

5

The intent of this is to send out as a sample of my work, does that change how I should approach this?