Portfolio Savvy

By LuAnne Zilka

Over 100 design students, educators, and design professionals attended the Harold Linton Design Portfolio lecture on Friday, October 3, 2008 at the U of M, McNeal Hall on the St. Paul campus.  In addition, on Saturday, October 4, 2008, 17 students and professionals participated in the all day Design Portfolio Workshop at the Rapson Center on the U of M, Minneapolis campus.  The events were sponsored by the IIDA Northland Chapter, ASID U of M Chapter, and the U of M College of Design.

Students at IIDA & ASID information table before the lecture.

The lecture and workshop focused on the many roles a portfolio plays in almost all professions.  A portfolio should best represent and market yourself, your product and/or your firm.  Make sure to take the time to create this and not leave it to the last minute. Designers can create the entire design portfolio into a work of art from scratch. 

Portfolios can be created in all shapes and sizes.  Some are fashioned of  8 ½” x 11” loose plates of chip board in a hand crafted wood box or 11” x 17” bound sheets in book form with a wood cover.  Other examples use vellum sheets with printed text between paper sheets of photos and drawings.  Covers can be made from a variety of materials from metal to leather to clear frosted plastic.  They can also be die cut, embossed, and embellished.  Bindings can be sewn, perfect bound, comb bound, bolted and screwed and spiral bound.  There is no end to the variety of choices!

Some of the components of a portfolio are:

• Print pieces, photos, text and graphics
• Web presence, DVD’s, CD’s
• Resume tear sheets
• Teasers to “leave behind”
• Branding of your work and yourself
• Design and/or product statement
• Construction documents
• Sketches of the design process
• Renderings and drawings
• A finish binder or box preferably hand made

When designing your portfolio sheets or “spreads”, use an underlying invisible column grid for placement of your photos, sketches, and text on the page.  Don’t forget about the use of negative and positive space on your sheets.  The eye needs negative (white, empty) space to rest on so they can then focus on the positive space (photos, drawings, text). 

You can make a smaller portfolio book, box, brochure, or pocket folder to “leave behind” as you visit firms.  Many creative examples which included post card size photos of projects in a hand made pocket folder were displayed at the workshop.  These would also include your business card and sometimes a DVD or CD.

Some of the comments that I overheard about the lecture and workshop were, “I wish we could have a whole class semester on portfolio design” and “Using the underlying grids to form columns to place my text and photos in some type of order really makes sense”.  Finally, another student stated that, “This workshop will help me so much as I design and construct my portfolio for employment or application for graduate school”.

Autographed copies of Harold Linton’s book, Portfolio Design, Third Edition were also on sale at the lecture and workshop.  To find out more about portfolio design, check out Harold Linton’s website at www.portfoliodesign.com. 

L to R:  Cindy (U of M), Betty (Alex Tech College), Harold Linton,
Stephanie (U of M).

U of M Interior Design student working on portfolio.

Harold Linton with U of M student.

U of M student explaining the layout of her portfolio at the Saturday workshop.

Examples of student’s portfolio “spreads” at the workshop.