Design Academy

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Graphic Design Portfolio

Graphic Design Portfolio Layout

The making of a Graphic Design portfolio.

Your portfolio is a snapshot of where you are today, this month, or this year in your design process. It highlights your style, aesthetics, type choices, layout, and communication skills.

You have a couple of ways to approach your portfolio...

  • Copy it from someone that is well respected in the industry. Which usually just means you imitate their layout, type, or color scheme, because if you take their work it is called plagiarism.
  • Sit down and compile your best work, get feedback on that work, decide which pieces will be included, and how to best highlight the work. Develop explanations or stories around the work so that we will better understand your thinking and process.

Imitation is how we learn. When organizing your portfolio you should look at other portfolios to see how other graphic designers have approached the problem. It is important to remember that one graphic design portfolio does not fit all and if you imitate another’s too closely you will lose the essence of you.

Sometimes it’s better to look through the eyes or lens of the people that will be reviewing your portfolio. (Art Directors, Creative Directors, HR, Designers, Content Specialists, etc.) What are they looking for?

In a survey of decision makers on what makes a good portfolio a few things stood out.

  • Attention to detail
  • Design choices
  • Insight – found a different way of approaching the project
  • Communicated the message
  • Case Study showed their process

We have all heard that there are no shortcuts to success. The same holds true of a good portfolio. You need to spend time deciding what best represents you, and the work you want to do in the near future. There are some good areas of focus in this article.

We also offer a course that can help you through the process. Communicating Design.

Resources:

Inspiration

Communication Arts

Typography

Paula Scher
Awwwards
Behance

Layout

Lotta Nieminen
Kazuki Noda

Illustration

Peter Strain


Marc Andreessen Talks Education

Watch as Marc Andreessen talks education. He gives some clear answers on what you should think about when deciding where to go to school and what to study.

Find Your Learning and Training Fit

Marc Andreessen talks education
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

There is a lot of time, money, and resources involved in getting an education. We recommend you do the research and find the best fit for what you would like to learn.

It is helpful to consider a few things:

  • What are you interested in learning?
  • Where are the best places to learn what you are interested in?
  • Have you spoken to someone that has done what you want to do?
  • Did you consider an internship to see if your chosen path is a fit?
  • Have you considered an alternative way to reach the same goal?
  • Do you have the time and money to start a program right now?
  • Are you doing this for you or your parents, peers, or siblings?
  • Did you look at the economics of your field? The starting salary?


There are many stories on the student debt crisis which should make you question the value of some education paths. After watching the video “Marc Andreessen talks education,” do you have more questions? Remember that questions will get you the answers that help you make informed choices.

Learning (Gap) Year Manifesto

Many of you are contemplating taking a gap year since most higher education is not a good value right now.

There is more than one way to get to where you want to go. But first you need to try some things or Sample to better understand what you are interested in. Most learning is done through experience. Your goal is to optimize your life to gain as much experience as you can.

Focus on 3 Important Areas

  1. Breadth
  2. Diverse Experience
  3. Interdisciplinary Exploration

Breadth
There have been numerous studies that show being a specialist, and narrowing your focus right away does not always have the expected outcome. While at first you get a head start on people that are trying different things, in the end the generalists pass you because of their ability to connect different experiences that aid in problem solving.

Diverse Experience
Those same studies show that having diverse points of view and experiences leads to better solutions and outcomes. Combining different areas of experience brings new approaches to problems. It’s these new combinations of ideas and experiences that lead to break throughs. This sometimes looks like wandering around with no purpose but then shows up later in your life to help with an amazing discovery.

Interdisciplinary Exploration
The way to gain breadth and diverse experiences is through interdisciplinary exploration. This just means you explore ideas, topics, issues, solutions, of various and different disciplines. You examine the world through the eyes and methods of different fields. When you are curious about something you explore it.

During the pandemic there are some perceived limitations to getting experiences. We believe that one of the most effective ways to gain experience is to make things and get feedback.

If you want to work on your writing… write. People will resonate with what you are writing or they will not. There are lots of ways to gain experience, and they all include doing them. Luckily there are plenty of guides in the form of books, blog posts, podcasts, and videos to inspire you and help you along your way.

If you get stuck try google.

There are a lot of professions that sound great when you are thinking about them. It is sometimes a shock when you go into that business environment only to find out it was nothing like you thought. There are many degreed professionals that are not doing what they studied because of match quality.

Match quality. How does the profession you are interested in match your personality, interests, and curiosities? People that take the time to find what matches their curiosities and interests accelerate past people that started to specialize early. There is a perception that you are being left behind. In reality you are delaying gratification so that you better match what you will be doing for quite some time. This results in greater achievements in the future.

There are also plenty of soft skills that you can work on. We have given you some examples below. The key here is to put anything you learn from your sources into practice. You can’t fully learn without the experience of doing.

You are ready to start the adventure of Gap Year.

Normally this would include travel and being exposed to other cultures, geographies, languages, and ways of thinking. Since the pandemic is limiting travel you need to replicate those experiences remotely. Here is your syllabus.

Fall Semester 2020

Learning & Doing

Start with diversifying your interests (Sample) and understand what you want.
Read the book Range to see why.
Principles: Life and Work

Strengthen your understanding of people and their needs. Ask them questions.
Predictably Irrational
Liminal Thinking: Create the Change You Want by Changing the Way You Think

Learn how you solve problems and determine success. Problem solving is future proof.
Read:
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Questions Are the Answer
The Design of Everyday Things

Learn to communicate. You can’t keep it all in your head.
Start a blog. Communicate your questions, ideas, insights, and start connecting the dots.
David Perell – The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online

Learn about remote work. It’s here and going to be a large part of business in a pandemic.
Read Remote.

Reflect on what you have learned and how you learned it (self taught). Now how it can be applied to your community, state, nation, or world.

Final Project

Write a manifesto for what you would like to see in the world. Get feedback on it.

Spring Semester 2021

Application of what you are learning.

Bring some part of your manifesto to life.

Study use cases for applying ideas to markets.
Zero to Sold
Hacking Growth
Principles: Life and Work

Put together a diverse team of collaborators.
Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Find a Critical Problem.

Make bets or experiments on how to solve it

Continue testing and refining until you have a solution that people will spend money on or pivot and use what you learned to start the next project – problem & solution.

Final Project

Pitch your solution to a market or investors. Get feedback and apply what you learned.

At the end of this gap year you will better understand yourself and the things that interest you. You will have learned to Sample in order to find things that line up with your interests and skills. You will be closer to your Match Quality. If you decide on a traditional education you will be better prepared to demand what you need out of an education. You will not be creating debt while figuring out what to do next.

Help learners make good choices.

Help Learners Make Good Choices

Help learners make good choices. Remote learning has quickly become the standard for safer learning. As remote learning continues to accelerate, we need to look at the larger picture. We need to focus on the experience of learning and that of education.

What are students experiencing day to day in the classroom or on a video stream? How has the system adapted to help learners? How can we help schools, administrators, teachers, students, and families?

To really help we need to start developing a plan that includes resilient strategies. The strategies need to include enrollment, value propositions, technology, planning, parent, teacher, and student support.

What do we prioritize? The student. The learner and their experience.

Right now we are looking for miracles. Let’s prepare for a future that includes helping students make good choices. Consider integrating more experiences in deeper learning. Encourage student led initiatives, higher thinking, collaboration, and project based assignments. These experiences become the foundation for better learners.

The advice we give will help learners make the best choices. That advice may be a gap year for higher education students. It may include supplemental learning from outside sources. Outside learning helps balance the needs of schools, students, and state requirements.

As we shift our focus to the learning experience we need to embrace diverse methods of learning. We need to start looking at inclusive solutions from inside and outside the community.

But how do we get started?

We can start by observing and measuring the current learning experience. Then use the data to identify what is working, and what isn’t. Be very careful of biases. What peaks your curiosity? What doesn’t make sense? Use simple tests or experiments to identify patterns and areas that will have the greatest impact.

We have asked some of the brightest minds in education what’s next and they have answered the need for learner choice. So go help learners make good choices.