Hey, what's up? Welcome back to Archi Hacks.
Today I'll be reviewing my own portfolio
that got me into both OMA and BIG.
I'll walk you through each page,
focusing on presentation and layout techniques
that you can use in your own work,
so make sure to stick around, and let's get into it.
ARCHI HACKS Life Hacks for Students and Architects
This portfolio is available in the link below,
so you can look at it at your own pace.
This is the cover of the portfolio.
I've just left it super minimal,
only telling you essential information.
And the first spread —
On the left there's a quick profile,
just to be a little bit more friendly,
and on the right side there's my resume.
At this point I'd only had one internship,
but I tried to place as many relevant experiences as possible.
One thing I wanted to emphasize throughout my whole portfolio
was that I do a lot of extracurricular activities,
so I have dedicated a large portion of my resume to my achievements.
This doesn't have to be the case for you:
Maybe your experience is the biggest priority,
or maybe your academic achievement,
or it could be your diverse skillset,
so just take this as a grain of salt,
and there are various techniques that I'll be going through in this portfolio
that could be applicable in emphasizing your strong suit.
The second page is a table of contents
that lays out where each project is coming from.
Again, I wanted to emphasize how many projects I've done,
so I've listed them all out here,
but I've also highlighted the ones that will be shown in this portfolio, like this.
And next...
I had a previous devotion into cinematography
so I get a lot of inspiration from movies,
and I wanted the beginning of each project to look like a movie poster.
So I'm using full screen, no blank spaces at the edge,
and a lot of white spaces,
and some subtle texts that emphasize...
or give you this cinematic feeling that I think was important.
I like to start a portfolio with the most interesting project
that starts off with a bang,
and this is, by far, probably the most outrageous project
and I wanted to use this to capture the attention.
That is a part of a bigger narrative that you should be thinking about.
Like an essay where you want to hook in your reader,
your portfolio is really no different, so
think about the strategy to bring them in,
and then keep them in there somehow.
It starts off with a simple explanatory diagram,
a little bit of section...
It's quite straightforward; it's only 3 pages long,
and it's mostly based on renders and drawings.
The second project again starts with a full bleed.
It mostly follows with the same pattern,
and I'll be covering how I came up with this image
in more detail in a future video,
so make sure to stay tuned for that.
In each page, I want to bring full emphasis
into one element at a time
so, despite what we would like to have,
you need to understand that the readers
or your employer might have limited attention,
so it is important that you make the presentation as easy to read as possible.
and that is why I either have one main content per page
or one main content for the spread,
and it trickles down from here.
For example on this spread I'm
putting a lot of emphasis on the background research that we've done,
and then the second part is our design motivations.
Following up in the second one,
I'm diving slightly deeper into the design of the building.
So as you can see, this sectional perspective
takes up the most amount of space,
because I want this to be the main image.
And the supporting images are placed in the smaller section,
in a smaller font, as smaller images, to support that.
This tends to create a visually pleasing —
as well as easy-to-understand — presentation layout.
Alright, coming to the next page,
I'm utilizing a vertical spacing this time.
Again, I'm using this full-bleed rendering on the right side
to put a solid end to the project.
And the left side —
you can see the hierarchy between what is most important,
second most important, and then third most important.
In a large section I divided by colour,
and then it breaks down into subsections from there on.
So your readers will know exactly how
to find out the kind of information that they're looking for.
And all the projects so far — They're actually all competition projects,
and again I'm emphasizing the fact that
I'm doing a lot outside of school.
This actually came up during the interview,
and ended up becoming one of the suits that made me stand out.
Again, this doesn't have to be competitions;
you can have anything else as your strong suit.
Try to find creative ways to bring that up
again and again and try to drive that home.
One thing I noticed about my projects so far
is that I don't have a lot of physical models,
and I'm actually using my rendering abilities
to create, or simulate, model-looks like this one.
I'll be linking a video on the top-right corner
about how you can use render engines
to create physical models like that.
And moving onwards...
On this spread I wanted to focus solely on orthographic drawings.
That's why this whole page is dedicated to that.
And as you can imagine,
when the person who's reviewing my application lands on this page
the only thing they can think about is how excellent this candidate is at line drawing.
And moving onwards...
Similarly, this page is focusing solely on rendering.
If there are any drawings in particular that you would like me to cover,
make sure to leave it in the comments,
and I'll be making follow-up videos on that.
And last but not least...
I had one internship at this point so I wanted to dedicate a section for that.
Coincidentally, I worked on one of the OMA projects,
and I think this ended up helping me get a job there in the future.
So if you are working at an architecture office
that is an execution architect for bigger offices that you would like to get into,
try to see if you can help with that project,
and get a sense of what kind of pace and intensity they work at,
and this will give you a good sense of
how you can prepare for your future internships.
And that is the end of my portfolio;
I've reviewed other portfolios by students at Harvard and Waterloo,
so make sure to check those out if you're interested.
If you would like me to review your portfolio,
feel free to drop me a link.
Last but not least, the portfolio wasn't the only factor in play.
I'll be explaining how to maximize your chances
of landing a dream internship in future videos, so stay tuned.