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The Bradley University Senior Portfolio Exhibit was hosted by the Aldo Castillo Gallery in Chicago on April 30th, from 4:30 to 7:00 pm. The Gallery is located at 675 N. Franklin Street, Chicago. (View Images of the show)

The senior portfolios and projects were also exhibited in Peoria at the Heuser Art Center on the Bradley University Campus from May 10–13, with an opening reception  Sunday afternoon, May 10th. View Images of this Show.

I have been teaching portfolio design for over 15 years and I aways underestimate the propensity for procrastination among students. Not that we don’t all do that some extent, but to all teachers—me included—I want to recommend you insist that portfolios be complete and in hand, printed, bound and presentation-ready  four weeks before the end of the semester. The remaining time can be spent in practice presentations, developing custom résumé packages, developing a personal contact list, and creating your web presence.

This semester I did not insist on an early deadline. And now, we are a week away from a major portfolio exhibition, and I have not seen one completed book!

Some students have sent repeated pdf’s asking for comments— but you can judge only so much from a pdf. There are many things you cannot judge looking at an image on a screen. You should absolutely do a test printing of your portfolio before you do the final version of it. It does not have to be on good paper, it does not even have to be in color, but it will give you (and anyone looking at it) the feel for how it comes together as a book or presentation. It would be wise to test the binding method as well, so you can test your sequencing concept. As you know, you cannot judge readability of type looking at it on a monitor. Page layouts depend on margins, size of images, resolution, all of which are impossible to evaluate on a monitor.

It is false economy to not expend the time and perhaps some money on making a test print. But having time to live with the results will give you greater insight into it, you can decide what you will say about each project. Budget your time to allow for printer malfunction, trimmer errors, and the slings and arrows of outrageous bad luck that any project is heir to.

As I wrote to my students recently, “this is a project like no other.” A single misspelled word necessitates reprinting. On a class project, you may rationalize “OK, a small mistake, a couple points off, but it won’t hurt my GPA all that much.” This, not to put too fine a point on it, is your future!.

Gary Will, coauthor of the textbook Graphic Design Portfolio Strategies, has been working closely with students on customized portfolio packages, using methods described in the Chapter 8 of the book. Here are two letters from current students reporting responses from employers.

Dear Gary

I meant to tell you I sent in my resume package to a company in
Chicago for an Internship and in less than a week I had received a
call from a lady who wanted to call me personally and tell me how much
she loved my resume package. She said that it was definitely something
that stood out from any other resumes they had received and that they
have never seen anything like that before and had been showing it to
everyone else in the office. Thought you might like to know that the
project was a success!

Alyssa Johnson.

Dear Gary

went to my interview anyways and the first thing the lady did when
I sat down was to hold up my book and say, “This is a great idea. This
book is the sole reason you are here. It was the only thing out of a
bunch of boring white resumes that caught my eye and let me know how
you designed.” The next morning, only about 18 hours after my
interview, I found out that I got the job! The OWNER called me to
praise me on the resume experience book that I had sent. So I know
that maybe some people (including me) blow off those kinds of
projects, but obviously it really works. And honestly, being a MM
major, they would have never told me to make a BOOK. It’s always make
a DVD or game….but I wanted to thank you for having that project in
your class because I doubt I would have gotten this job without having
done that project!

Thank you so much Gary!

Amanda deFrees

You can visit Gary Will’s web site at http://gcc.bradley.edu/faculty/Will,%20Gary/Garysnewsite/Site/

Sarah Kelly just sent me this link to a page on Creative Opera that shows some examples of résumés and matching web sites. The advice given at the end of the examples is excellent. Many of the examples are good, although some seem to border of being too busy. Here is the link:

http://www.creativeopera.com/2009/beautiful-design-resumes-and-their-matching-portfolio-websites/