My previous entry, 4 Tips for Landing Your First Design Job, focused on leveraging your personal brand in order to achieve that goal. This post will center on crafting a portfolio that reinforces your strengths, and brand, to further that cause.
Between school, freelance and internships you are bound to have a lot of work you COULD show. However, not everything deserves a place in your portfolio. You might be really proud of that first freelance project you got designing a flyer for a local restaurant. Chances are the owner art directed the piece to death and made you include terrible pictures of the food and his cat Meatballs. Does it belong?
The curation of a portfolio says a lot about a designer and how they think. Like an advertisement, the visual, headline and body copy send deliberate messages to the viewer. Take a look at your portfolio. What does it say about you? Start by limiting yourself to 10-15 pieces and go from there. (more…)