He oversees all creative production and marketing for the studio and one of his duties as Creative Director is to interview talent and hire new artists for full-time or freelance positions. Ponder how you might account for these things, speak to them, and design them into the visual experience of your portfolio piece.Mike Campau is the Creative Director of SeventhStreet, a small studio in Birmingham, Michigan, that uses retouching and CGI to create dynamic imagery for the advertising community. Why? Because your potential employer is hiring you, not your project, and documenting yourself in the project in addition to the shiny results is a much better way of answering the questions on their minds. To address these underlying questions, I have written up a list of the “nitty gritty” details that I have never seen visualized in a portfolio, but I feel could…nay…SHOULD be visually present per portfolio project. These are the types of questions that every job interview digs into, but design portfolios rarely represent. Your portfolio projects are all with a team, but how do you think as an individual? How much of the design process have you been exposed to? What skills are you really bringing to the table? If we are to dive a bit deeper into the questions of “Can you do the work?” and “How will you work with others?”, we begin to think about questions like the following: Identify how your design solution met end user’s needs (solved problem, created value, etc.) Identify how your design solution achieved business results (increased customer awareness, increased sales, changed position in market, etc.) Real world design projects are almost always attached to these outcomes, and a designer should be able to speak to them. But even if you are fresh out of school and have no real clients, end users, or even potential clients, do the leg work and think about how your design solution might speak to these two points. Given the variety of project types and your experience level, this is not always possible. Things begin to get more interesting when you can speak to not just the design work, but also it’s impact on the end user as well as the business outcome. Just try to fill in the points above as best you can so you can communicate accurately where you are at in your design learning process. Note: It’s ok also to NOT understand a skill from all these vantage points. You don’t have to actually list these in your portfolio, but you want to be able to use them as talking points when presenting, so it is good to have thought them through in advance. Go through your mapped skills and see if you can write up these points for each one. When you speak to a skill from both vantage points, you demonstrate your knowledge in a way that says you understand both the parts of a design process, as well as the process as a whole. How did it inform the design decision process in the project? How was the artifact generated? Was it in a program or done by hand? Why? On the “ Execution” level, you might want to talk about the following: What are the best practices you should keep in mind when executing this skill? How does it fit within the needs of a design workflow? In principle, how and why is a skill used? For the “ Big Idea” vantage point, you want to think about how you might communicate the following:
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