Dear Undergraduates...yet again!
Lego Minifigs - gotta love 'em!

Dear Undergraduates...yet again!

Many of you will have read my previous ‘Dear Undergraduates’ articles.

I hope these have been useful for all of you currently in the time warp that is end of year submission time!

Over the past months, I’ve been speaking to a huge number of undergraduates about all manner of issues they face, and this article covers many of the questions and discussions that ensued and that were not covered (or at least not in enough detail) in my previous articles. As always, I’ve written them in the order in which they occurred to me.

Once again, I reiterate that these opinions are my own and may not necessarily be shared by my peers or others in positions of seniority and looking to hire. I’m pretty sure much of it will get some grey nods from some, but don’t follow it rote. They are just my views.


1.    Conversations

Over the past months, I’ve had a number of discussions with final year design students about their portfolios and something has come up repeatedly...

How much to put on each page?

Without wishing to dictate to each student how they should put their own portfolio together (as it’s ultimately a reflection of themselves), I often describe a portfolio as a collection of conversations to illustrate the point.

Imagine you started a conversation with a colleague and paused every minute or so to go to the bathroom. Your colleague's attention is broken and you are expecting them to recall the last conversation each time you re-start the conversation afresh on your return.

Now imagine that toilet break is each time you turn a page of your portfolio. If you are talking about the insights, research, observations and hypotheses you collated when understanding a specific problem you are attempting to solve, you want to ensure that their attention is focussed on that specific phase of the project and how skilled you are at making connections, digging for information and understanding behaviour. You don’t want to interrupt the conversation constantly by stretching that information over multiple pages, and asking your audience to remember prior page content when referring to process.

You want the audience to be engaged, inquisitive, agreeable and presented with enough information to study, yet not so much that they feel like they are drowning in detail. Ensure you put enough information on each page (or spread) that allows for a fruitful, in-depth and evidence based conversation without breaking flow (see later point) or boring them senseless.

It’s not easy, but done well is incredibly powerful.


2.    Don’t waste time ‘designing’ a portfolio

I have to be careful here, but I would suggest that a portfolio doesn’t need to be designed within an inch of its life. By that I mean that you don’t need to spend weeks crafting a personal monogram, or have your portfolio feel like it’s a supremely individual fashion catalogue, with extrovert personality oozing out of every page (unless of course you are a fashion student!).

By all means create a layout that has your individuality stamped on it, and ensure that it is suitably memorable, but I would argue that more time spent on clean, legible, well structured layout that can adapt to myriad content is far better time spent than ‘designing’ each and every page to make a statement.

Unless there is a really good reason for it, I should be more interested in the content of each page and the evidence it provides for your skills and approach (hard and soft) than the layout ‘design’ in each case. If an audience has to work really hard to ‘understand’ each page before digesting the content, you have made their job harder and your employment likelihood potentially lower.


3.    It doesn’t have to be finished…

I’ve mentioned this before.

In an ideal world, you would make a connection with someone before throwing a portfolio at them and begging for a job. In fact, I would argue that if you’ve done a really good job, your portfolio should only really be a backstop to someone thinking you are a good fit and potential hire. They should already be thinking you have ‘something’ before you turn the first page.

This is why you should not be so utterly focussed on crafting the shit out of a portfolio before doing anything else. Your priorities should be to gauge interest and make a personal connection before sharing any content. I would argue that someone who has made an approach, established a ‘human’ link and then shared a well presented ‘work in progress’ portfolio (or even examples of work) on request, is in a much better position than someone who sends a beautifully crafted portfolio to me in a blind email with a cover letter and a request for interview. As polite and well written as that email and cover letter might be, and as polished and curated as that portfolio might be, I haven’t made a human to human connection, which – as a designer – should be your priority.

Of course, if you can make a positive human connection and then follow up with a beautifully crafted portfolio and well written email, then all the better, but in a game of compromises and at a time when you have a thousand submissions looming and you are functioning on 3 hours sleep and Pot Noodles each night, I would opt for the former approach for a greater chance of success.


4.    Don’t blanket bomb

Anyone who thinks that sending a generic email and cover letter to hundreds of people, and only changing the name is misguided and assumes very little of the person receiving it.

It doesn’t work. Period.


5.    Be honest.

Someone reminded me of this point after I published the second of these ‘Dear Undergraduate’ articles, as it’s something one tends to assume of the work that you see. You presume that all the work in the portfolio belongs to the owner of the portfolio.

It’s a fair presumption, but one that more often needs challenging in a world of vast content creation. You may well get away with passing something off as yours when it isn’t when you include it in a portfolio and you send it via email, but I guarantee you that most experienced designers or creative managers have a 6th sense for this stuff – much like the Grand High Witch in Roald Dahl’s eponymous novel – we can smell out a masquerade.

If you ever have the audacity to include work that isn’t your own and you decide to pass it off as yours, you will face the ignominy and embarrassment of being quizzed and grilled to within an inch of your life by someone that knows full well that you are lying. Imagine the scene from Pulp Fiction where Samuel L. Jackson start to recant the verse from the Bible…you get the gist!

This is different to including work that you did as a group project.

It rarely makes sense to only include the bits you did, as the audience needs to understand the whole project to fully comprehend the impact or approach you took. Just make sure you are open and honest about which work is yours and what you contributed to the project. I’ve been in a situation where myself and a good friend were shortlisted as the final two for the same placement interview, and we had both included the same group project for that interview. If either of us had lied about our individual contribution, we would have been crucified, but we were aware enough (albeit as fresh faced 20 year olds) to be honest about it. Thank goodness.


6.    Flow

Linked to the point about conversations, it is important to understand the flow of your work and the way in which the story of your portfolio unfolds.

Make sure you structure it in a way that naturally builds on the page before. Work out how the pages link together to prevent a staccato, broken narrative. Present your work in a manner that takes the audience on a journey through the phases that you undertook and in an order that makes sense to them.

It may well be the case that in reality you did things in a completely ‘arse about face’ way, but make sure you present your work in a way that indicates you at least knew the correct order that things should have been done. Start with a problem and end with the solution. That is why you are probably being interviewed and hopefully hired. For your ability to tackle a problem and work towards a solution (with all the skills deployed along the way). Illustrate and describe what you did and how you did it in a timely and chronologically expected way.

Tell the story.


7.    Holiday snaps

We all know the feeling. Having to endure 200 photos of someone’s holiday when 10 would have sufficed. Repetition, erroneous detail and irrelevance.

Don’t fall into the trap of putting stuff into your portfolio because you’ve got it...because it simply exists. It may well be the case that it took hours to produce that particular visual and obviously you are incredibly proud of the 43 different views of that particular device you rendered in that second year module when you started using KeyShot, but the interviewer is just not as invested in your work as you are, and has invariably seen much better and much more refined visuals that you can produce, so be sparing and ensure that you include content that has a place and has it’s part in the portfolio narrative.

Be critical and be sparing in choosing what you include. Adding too much simply dilutes the impact of the good stuff fighting for attention. If it doesn’t serve to positively evidence your skills, showcase your thinking or validate your uniqueness, then leave it out.


8.    The 'shit magician' routine.

For all the reasons that I’ve described in earlier points, I’m of the opinion that work should probably be presented in a way that builds up to the final solution.

I’ve seen countless portfolios that open with the final solution render or contextual photo, which often leaves me a little flat after an initial spike of excitement. I’ve often described it as watching a magic act and seeing the big reveal at the start of the act before they’ve had a chance to tell the story, build the tension, misdirect and set the scene.

It doesn’t make sense.

As someone in the industry of solving problems, it makes more sense (to me) to be introduced to the problem, understand the journey that the designer went on to navigate the possible opportunities and then start to form a picture of the eventual (possible) solution. Showing me the ‘money shot’ at the start almost makes me less inclined to listen to what the narrator has to say over the forthcoming pages, as I already know the punchline.

I appreciate there are two schools of thought on this, and I appreciate that some like to throw the heavy punch at the start to wake the audience up and impress them into leaning in. Sometimes this works but you have to work harder to maintain attention and interest if you do decide to go that route.


9.    Prompts

Like any narrative or presentation, it is very easy to be interrupted or thrown off course by a curious audience or external factors….screen share not working as it should, the wrong cable for the projector, the meeting being interrupted…and particularly unnerving if you are a young graduate with a little presentation experience under your belt, but not enough to weather these storms quite as steadily as you think you should.

This is why I often urge students to include some relevant prompts in their portfolios. Blocks of text or key words to reinforce an image which help bring you back on course when you drift or your mind has suddenly become more vacuous than a Joey Essex monologue. It can be crops of images that help you remember to mention a particular part of the creative journey or numbers to help you navigate the page in a way that doesn’t confuse the audience. Either way, there’s nothing more soul destroying than feeling your mind go blank and not knowing how to claw it back.

Give yourself the sneaky little tools to help you clamber back aboard the good ship ‘HMS Interview’! If it’s any consolation, your interviewer will most likely get clammy hands and sympathise when you fall off the coherence train, as it is likely they will get some rather vivid flashbacks! They will invariably ask you if you want a glass of water and suggest you take a few minutes to breathe!


10. Instagram accounts

I’ve been asked a few times about the need for a ‘design-centric’ Instagram account.

There’s been a recent panic in the ranks about rumours that suggest that it’s a necessity to get that killer job. Not helped, I’m sure, by the inability to meet up with people in this COVID invested world and a reliance on social media to gauge your relative standing amongst the wider peer group.

All I can say is that, whilst I’m sure there are stories of people who will no doubt suggest that their Instagram design porn secured them the job they’d always wanted, I would argue that any employer should be looking beyond that eye candy and consider the bigger picture before hiring someone on the basis of some rendered squares on a smartphone.

For sure, that person may have done a great job of promoting themselves and ensuring that their work is noticed (which in turn gives them a hook to create an interview opportunity), but I still think that targeted, personable, individual approaches will still yield greater dividends than any social promotion. You will undoubtedly get significant interest from your peer group who will fawn over your manicured and curated posts, but if it’s a choice between completing your project and making some tactical approaches or securing a job using social media, I’d place my bets on the former. The odds of the latter guaranteeing success is scarily low….but ‘hats off’ to anyone who manages it!


---------------------

I hope these articles are useful to the graduating masses?

I would urge anyone to be a little more receptive and a little more understanding to the class of 2021 as they emerge from their bubbles and festering isolation chambers, and do everything they can to help them get their first step on the career ladder. It’s a scary time and we need to reassure them that we are a friendly, supportive and encouraging bunch who need to ensure that the industry is filled with more of the same.

Pay it forward.

Good luck.

Until next time.

Russell

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