When to have your portfolio ready
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!.