Developing Entry-Level Portfolios: Strategies for Graduating Students

What I read

In this article, Coleman offers practical tips on portfolio development for landscape architects who are about to apply for their first job.

First, Coleman describes that she interviewed employers and schools to understand how important portfolios are, and how students are learning to make them. Employers indicated that they view portfolios as an important part of a larger view of a candidate, where interviewers also value confidence and a positive attitude.

She then describes a number of tips that students can leverage to create their portfolios.

First, Coleman describes that students who took portfolio design courses felt they were better prepared than those who didn’t, but of the 43 schools she surveyed, only 7 offered semester-long instruction on how to prepare a portfolio. According to one of her interviewees (at the University of Georgia), a portfolio class should teach basic graphic design principles, layout, and image manipulation. It should also provide opportunities for peer-review, and a sketch-to-digital process for laying out work. Coleman also describes pragmatics, like keeping digital copies of work, starting at a first-semester level. She notes that it will take 40-80 hours to assemble a portfolio.

Next, Coleman describes that an organizational system is a fundamental part of a portfolio; this system should include a logo, graphic image, invisible grid, or colors to “tie your portfolio together” so it has a “consistently pleasant look and feel.” She suggests that a portfolio is like a musical arrangement or a book, and should have a rhythm. Some approaches for non-visual organization are a question-answer approach (ask a question on one page, and answer it on the next), or a unified theme across the work.

A portfolio should be personal, she explains, including volunteer work, hobbies, and art, and while it should include collaborative projects, it should also emphasize individual work. She quotes a partner at a design company as saying “A portfolio is only as good as its weakest piece” and suggests that quality is much more important than quantity. This is true in the selection of pieces to include, and being succinct in the amount of text included. “Employers will not take time to look through a long portfolio.”

Next, Coleman describes that a portfolio isn’t a static item; it is a framework, and pieces should be added or removed based on the specific company that a candidate is interested in. This requires research into the company to understand what they value; this research can come through professors, alumni, and from contacting the company itself.

More pragmatically, Coleman describes that a printed portfolio can be expensive, and so a CD is a more financially-viable way to reproduce the work. And, she reminds students to save their work frequently and in “two different places,” and to also proofread their work because typos can make or break a portfolio review.

She summarizes that the purpose of a well-designed portfolio is “to communicate to others your abilities and your approach to design, and to offer a glimpse of you, the person behind the portfolio.”

What I learned and what I think

This piece is from a 2004 edition of Landscape Architecture. I picked it because I need a break from overly academic work, and because portfolios are on my mind as a result of my UCI students, and as a result of a larger conversation that seems to be happening in the world of design. Additionally, there just isn’t a lot of content about how to make a portfolio, and that’s a gap in the world of ideas.

There are so many differences between the context of this paper and the world of design right now, that it would be easy to write it off. I’m not a Landscape Architect, it’s not 2004, people don’t send physical portfolios, and this internet thing has supplanted CDs and added opportunities for research that just didn’t exist in 2004.

But a number of the suggestions are right-on:

Pick fewer items to include (even two will do); quality is more important than quantity. The quote above about a portfolio being as good as the worst piece is exactly right. My students stress about how little they have to work with. It doesn’t matter, and of course they have few projects, because they haven’t been doing this for very long.

Develop an organizational system so that the work feels like it’s part of a consistent whole. The example of a question/answer is unique, and I can see it working well for “what was the problem you were trying to solve?” and “what types of decisions did you have along the way?”

It needs to look good, and it needs to be short, and it needs to have only a tiny amount of text. It seems like the no-attention-span attitude was happening in landscape architecture in 2004, too. Lazy evaluation; “I’m so busy.”

Do some research about who you are sending the thing to, and tailor the contents to that person or company. The networking legwork is something students just don’t seem to want to do.

In 2004, portfolios were a mysterious thing, and they still are. A difference seems to be the urgency of the current portfolio discussion, and commodity discussion, and blanding discussion, that is swirling around the design industry.

So, the polemic part of a Sunday morning.

The idea of “user experience” screwed up the industry of interaction design in a big way. The idea that we experience software and so we should be called experience designers and that we design experiences for users was broad enough that it made superficial sense, and then it shifted the whole focus on making things from a focus on craft and execution and problem solving to a focus on untrained warm bodies following a dumb process to make dumb software. I saw this when Big Bank Client suddenly declared that their ~300 business analysts were now called user experience designers. I saw this when the Usability Professionals Association declared they were now the User Experience Professionals Association, and now usability and human factors engineers were now user experience designers. It happened when product management couldn’t figure out the intertwining of the way someone uses something and the way it looks, and so they created the ridiculous UX/UI distinction.

The bootcamps taught to this, and broke the industry more. What can you learn in ten weeks? While you are working fulltime? In a crappy online format? Where attendance is optional? And your teacher is someone who just graduated from the same bootcamp you are taking? They can show you a lot, but you’ll learn only a little, because in the best case, you have no time to practice, and in the worst case, the whole educational model is busted. So you were shown a survey of methods that you practiced once, and they hang together because you were shown a survey of a process that you practiced once, and you produced a portfolio that shows exactly what you did and learned, which is very little.

At a lower level, undergraduate design schools have built foundations programs for a reason: creative problem solving requires making things, and you can’t make things if you haven’t gained skills, creative confidence, and attention to detail. The skills change based on the specific medium, but there are some basics that I don’t feel will ever (ever?) change, around 2d, 3d, color, space, and so on.

At a higher level, design schools focus on ill-defined projects that demand investigation and curiosity. They have so little structure that you can’t just start making things. Structure has to come from somewhere, so there’s a process that gets introduced along the way. The process has methods in it. You learn the methods while you do the project.

And you do it over and over. In a 4 year program, I would imagine that an industrial design student would work through about ten different design projects, with about three of them having real, meaningful depth of inquiry and practice of eight or ten weeks, or even more. And in that number of attempts, you learn a pattern language. It’s not a very big one, but it’s there, and it’s a pattern about the problem and how to approach it.

A pattern language is not a box of methods.

So I’m working through a problem of bootcamps, a problem of labeling, a problem of industry expectations, a problem of method and process and patterns… So too are lots of others, because there’s been a ton of articles in the last few months/years about this.

ux design is broken

The We built UX. We broke UX. And now we have to fix it!

The UX of Learning UX is Broken

Thinking in Triplicate

Enter late-stage UX

And on and on and on…

I have no buttoned up conclusions today.

So I will now go mow the lawn.