Okay, we’re talking about portfolios today.
What to include, what not to include, where to host yours, and tips for designing and
maintaining one.
We’ll cover everything you need to know to make one that’s flexible and useful over
time whether you’re a student or a professional.
Be sure to stick around at the end for details on how you can have your portfolio reviewed
on the channel.
Your portfolio is a professional statement of who you are, the kind of work you do, and
your process.
It speaks for your brand in your absence and everyone needs one.
This is the last paper-based portfolio I created back let’s just say, it was a long time
ago the last time I was seeking employment with another firm.
Putting this together wasn’t terribly difficult, but it also wasn’t very time efficient.
And, it was expensive to maintain, keep up to date, which is probably what kept me from
regularly updating it.
Because your portfolio is already out-of-date when you publish it, a paper copy’s long-term
utility is questionable.
Now, I’m not going to show you how to create one of these.
You really only need one portfolio and that’s a digital portfolio.
Within the digital sandbox though there are a subset of decisions you’ll need to make.
Will you use an app on a tablet for example, a multi-page PDF, a web-hosted portfolio,
or a self-hosted website?
No matter where you choose to host it, the currency of a digital portfolio is imagery,
usually in the form of J-PEGs.
You’ll also need some text, a bio and a backbone of metadata.
Digital platforms allow your work to be easily shared, collaged and manipulated and they
can quickly be replaced with new work as you complete it.
They also allow you to use audio and video to present your work.
A digital portfolio’s distinct advantage is related to online search and metadata.
But we’ll get into that in a minute.
Among digital portfolios, there are important differences; not just any digital portfolio
will suffice.
Probably the easiest thing to do is to host your work on someone else’s online platform.
Free or low-cost online portfolio hosting on sites like Behance, Issuu, Coroflot, and
others offer modern, minimally styled portfolio templates, which can be set up in a matter
of minutes.
But consider that you’re sitting beside thousands of other designers looking for exactly
the same thing you are: to stand out in a crowd not to mention all those pop-ups and
adverts.
Ask yourself if that’s really the best place to distinguish your brand.
Another straightforward option is to install an app like Morpholio or Portfolio on a tablet
and curate your images there.
It’s handy for face-to-face client or employer presentations, but it suffers from some of
the same limiting factors related to the physical portfolio and you’re only an app update
away from it no longer functioning as you’d expect.
This approach is effectively a digital picture frame and ignores all the useful data embedded
in your digital works.
Data you could be using for discovery.
Ideally, your goal should be to control every digital asset you possibly can and all the
branding surrounding it.
Everywhere.
If Behance ceases to exist tomorrow, or that tablet app doesn’t work because you just
updated your operating system, where does that leave your portfolio?
You can’t control what you don’t own.
This is why I think the only real portfolio option today is a self-hosted website.
Now, this isn’t a difficult exercise, I promise.
If you don’t have one, I recommend using Squarespace because the templates are minimally
styled with simple navigation and full-screen galleries.
This allows your work to be the most prominent content on the page and keeps you from spending
more time designing the container for your portfolio than the content inside.
The best portfolios not only showcase your work, they narrate who you are as a designer,
how you see the world, and something about your personal design process.
Use it to narrate your story.
At a minimum, I think your site should include two pages an About page and a Portfolio page.
As you have time you can build it out from there.
First, the Portfolio page.
Only include your best work.
You only have a short time to convince someone you’re worth a second look, a couple of
minutes at most.
A few remarkable projects are preferable to many half-baked ones.
Supplement with minimal, descriptive text in the sidebar.
The infographic style which overlays paragraphs of text on the image won’t be read by anyone
online and it only serves to confuse the viewer.
You should look to other professionals to see how their portfolios are structured.
Take note that they’re using properly exposed, well-composed photographs of buildings, with
deep blacks and white whites.
Simple line work for floor plans, elevations and sections when they exist and they directly
present models and renderings without any overlaid text.
They’re forcing you to focus on the work, not a sidebar or lots of text or fancy icons.
You should learn from this.
Precisely what you choose to show should be influenced by the type of work you’re seeking.
Now, this applies to students, interns, and professionals alike.
If you fill yours with slick computer renderings and no sketches it tells me that your primary
competency is computer rendering.
If you’re seeking a computer modeling position, that’s probably a good strategy.
However, if you’re looking to be a lead designer, show your process: your sketches,
your models, alongside your renders.
Sketches.
Now, hand sketching and the ability to graphically communicate your ideas is fundamental to our
practice and it will always be.
It’s one of the most sought after skills in our profession at every experience level
so be sure to include them in your portfolio.
Models.
When I see a hand-built model in a portfolio I stop and take notice.
I recognize, on this one, that it’s a personal bias of mine.
But, the reason I mention it is to encourage you to research the places or people you want
to work with.
Understand what resonates with them.
If you ring that bell, you’ll distinguish your portfolio from everyone else’s in their
eyes.
This goes for businesses looking to establish a presence in a niche or with a specific clientele
as well.
Computer Renders.
I think computer renderings are fantastic when done well.
But I also think they’re a bit of a commodity today.
The best renders illustrate your artistic viewpoint: a building’s true nature, the
messiness of the world, a narrative, a story.
This is much more appealing to me than rendering every last shiny pane of glass and every perfect,
happy, balloon-wielding child walking toward it.
Showing some versatility is a plus too, even for seasoned pros.
Sculpture, photography, drawing, furniture design, filmmaking; whatever creative pursuits
you engage in when you leave the studio should have some sort of home in your portfolio.
Including academic or theoretical projects is usually your only option early in your
career.
As you begin practicing and building things, always be photographing and documenting your
work with your portfolio in mind.
Process imagery typically gets lost along the way when you’re busy, but it’s often
just as compelling as the final work.
It’s proof too of your skill as an architect and your ability to shepherd your ideas through
the battlefield of design and construction.
There comes a point in your career when you’re transitioning from student academic work to
built-work.
Tailor your portfolio to the narrative you’re advancing.
I would expect an intern architect to have fewer built works than a newly licensed architect,
while a mid-career architect is likely to have all buildings and no academic work in
their portfolio.
The jump to professional photography is a big step.
But, think about the time investment of designing and building the work.
Isn’t that worthy of hiring another pro to document it properly?
It has little value if the photographs don’t complement the quality of your design.
And, image quality directly correlates to what you can charge for your services.
Again, it’s all about the narrative.
Professional photography projects a narrative of confidence to your clients and justifies
your professional fee.
If you can’t afford professional images invest in a good DSLR and learn to use it
along with Lightroom and Photoshop.
Be sure to watch my video on what I use in my studio.
If you’re including project images from a previous employer be sure to get permission
and purchase the rights to use the images on your site beforehand.
Photographers – like architects – retain the rights to their work, architects typically
purchase a license to use the photos for marketing purposes.
Now, let’s get into the second page you need on your website slash portfolio, the
About page.
This is your chance to show your personality.
A brief bio is helpful just don’t get too cheeky.
Draft this as you might your Twitter or Instagram bio.
Everyone is sort of accustomed to quickly skimming these for information and they can
say a lot about your character with very few words.
Link up a PDF of your CV or your resume.
Also, include links to your social profiles somewhere on this page: LinkedIn, Twitter,
Instagram, etcetera.
People can click as they want or need more information.
And, don’t forget to include your preferred contact details and make sure it’s a professional
email address, not something like: meat-boy ninety-six at hotmail dot com.
If you’re seeking an internship, or you’re a student, you can list a range of relevant
skills.
Be sure though that if you list it a skill that you can honestly stand behind your competency.
Can you confidently make something with whatever it is you’re listing?
If the answer is yes, keep it otherwise leave it off.
Now, skills I would look for when hiring are any that display your creative problem solving
skillset.
Hand graphics: can you sketch, draw, watercolor?
If so, show me.
Visual communication is extremely important, what digital graphic skills do you have: Photoshop,
Lightroom, InDesign?
Architecture is as much about good communication skills as it is about design skills an effective
communication begins with writing.
Do you blog?
Have you published anything?
Have you given any public presentations?
Any web development skills?
Do you know WordPress?
Are you a social media influencer or expert?
Tell me about your online marketing skills.
Do you know anything about e-mail list development using ConvertKit, AWeber, or Mailchimp?
Then there’s CAD skills.
Now, I don’t necessarily care what flavor of CAD you know, because to me it’s just
another tool; a means to an end.
If you know one CAD program, chances are you can learn any CAD program.
How about digital modeling and rendering?
Do you know SketchUp, 3DSMax, Rhino, Lumion, etcetera?
Present the skills you want to be hired for.
Work that wasn’t designed by you.
This sort of goes without saying, but this should extend to projects you didn’t have
a creative force in realizing.
Almost all architecture is the result of a team of people; architects understand this
and if you’re working in a large firm, you may not have generated the building concept.
Honestly state your role.
If you were part of a team say so, don’t claim credit for something you didn’t do.
Next up, old work.
Your portfolio isn’t an archive of every work you’ve ever completed.
Populate it with your best and most current work.
Projects from five years ago might look dated.
Next: a lot of text.
People aren’t going to read a life history or paragraphs of text, especially online.
Structure your text for legibility.
Think in the Heading One, Heading Two, Heading Three style format.
What’s the hierarchy of information you want people to understand?
Spelling errors.
Enough said.
Bad photos.
If you don’t have good photography for a project, leave it out.
Poor photography calls into question your other work as well and your judgment for including
it.
Next up, construction documents.
I’m going to assume if you’re building things in the world, you’ve sort of got
this figured out and if you’re an intern or graduate that you don’t yet.
So, including these isn’t terribly useful.
Next: irrelevant work experience.
Unless you creatively mowed lawns into amazingly detailed tartan grids as an art experiment,
don’t include this kind of thing as work experience.
And, hobbies.
If a hobby is a creative outlet for you, thread examples into your portfolio gallery rather
than sharing it as a separate interest out of context.
If you build your portfolio like this as a stand-alone website perhaps the most useful
by-products to you are the meta-skills you’ll learn by doing it.
These confer a real competitive advantage to you as an applicant.
If you know something about web development chances are good you’ll have the basic skills
to update nearly any website out there.
If you’re familiar with blogging, it also means you probably know something about writing,
and you probably have a sense for what it takes to visually and verbally communicate
your ideas.
It means you understand something about SEO and search rankings and marketing.
These are meta-skills that transfer to every possible vocation you might consider in the
future.
So even if this exercise doesn’t land you a job in architecture or a new client, you’ll
have the experience that can be brought to bear on a range of life paths and leveraged
to shape your future.
Without a website, you might as well not exist.
But, just having one doesn’t guarantee you’ll be discovered.
The metadata you include in your site is as important for discovery in search as the images
you upload to your portfolio.
Search engines can’t see images so they rely on the metadata appended to the image
when it’s uploaded.
Make sure to include metadata for every image you add to your site.
Use minimal, keyword-rich text to describe both your project pages and the images.
Title each image descriptively, using the alt-text field and make sure it’s sized
to load quickly.
Don’t expect five-meg J-PEGs to perform very well in search.
You want to optimize your images before you upload them.
Presenting your portfolio as a website is a known, comfortable experience for most everyone
in your target market.
And, it doesn’t involve emailing around fourteen-meg PDFs to a potential employer
or client.
You’ll simply send a link in your cover email.
When I receive a job inquiry with a fourteen-meg attachment in my inbox, I delete it.
I think it’s bad form to thrust a large uninvited document into someone’s inbox
especially without any kind of introduction.
Contrast this with a friendly email that makes a personal introduction and includes a link
to a website that says something like, “Hey, love your work especially the insert whatever
project you like, uh, if you’re ever looking for someone to complement your design team
I’d so appreciate your consideration.”
Now, the truth is I hear this kind of genuine plea for a human connection so infrequently,
that I’d absolutely click on the link and look, even if I wasn’t hiring.
Do you want to know what I do get all the time?
Those fourteen-meg PDFs attached to emails that read, “Dear Sir or Madam, please look
at my work and contact me at your earliest convenience to discuss my potential employment
with your firm.
My resume and portfolio are attached for review.”
These are immediately deleted and I can almost guarantee that every architect I know would
do the same.
A website is a resource you can direct as you wish, something you control.
As you finish projects and make new connections you can direct everything else you don’t
control online – things like social media profiles and email lists toward that asset
and you can use it to your benefit.
It’s easy to update and the metadata associated with each update ripples through the Internet
as Google’s spiders continually crawl your site, opening it up to search traffic, referrals,
and new opportunities.
Now as I mentioned in the beginning of the video, if you want to have a chance to have
your portfolio reviewed on an upcoming YouTube live-stream here, email me a link to your
portfolio, no fourteen-meg attachments, right?
And I’ll chose a few to critique in an upcoming live-stream.
Now, the only way I can get in touch with you and let you know when I’ll be live-streaming,
is if you’re a subscriber.
So, if you’re not already subscribed be sure to do so and click the bell so I can
notify you when it’s time to tune in.
Cheers.