The Myth of the Portfolio Piece
Q: I really want to make a killer portfolio piece. Should I take a packaging class? A UI class? What should I do?
So many design students feel a great and terrible pressure to produce work they can safely stuff into the mental flat file labeled PORTFOLIO. Apparently, they desperately want to make work they think “looks professional” so that they have something to graft onto cheap PSD mockups, plug into a Squarespace template, and eventually use to get freelance production design work at the second largest events company in Tulsa.
This fixation on traditional portfolio pieces is a total drag. Not only is it boring, it stunts your creative development. “How dare you say I’m creatively stunted?” you might ask. “I poured a hundred hours into this amazing Day of the Dead-themed tequila packaging. It took me a whole weekend just to hand-ink the sugar skull on the label!” When design students tell me they want their work to look professional, I hear them saying they want their work to look invisible. The standard they’re using for that tequila packaging is that it’s convincing enough to pass for something that’s already on the market. This amounts to hoping that the bottle you slaved over will vanish into the shelf of all the other budget tequilas in Trader Joe’s agave aisle.
Someone gets paid to design every billboard, every banner ad, every breakfast cereal box — it’s all totally professional, and almost all totally awful.
All “professional” means is that someone got paid. It doesn’t mean they got paid well. It doesn’t even mean they’re a designer. These days, most “professional” graphic design is made by marketers and PR flacks who don’t value graphic design enough to pay someone else to do it. Someone gets paid to design every billboard, every banner ad, every breakfast cereal box — it’s all totally professional, and almost all totally awful. Using “looks professional” as a standard will trap you into making safe versions of safe design, bad versions of bad design. It is a sure way to stagnate creatively at the exact moment when you should be growing the fastest.
If you’re already hellbent on making work that resembles work people get paid for, I can see why you’d be tempted to make work that resembles work people get paid a LOT for. Unfortunately, that’s another creative dead end. Just look at what some of the best-compensated designers are getting up to these days. Now that tech companies have started building giant in-house design teams, promising entry level visual designers can command six-figure salaries. What are these bright young things actually doing with all their professional design time? Most of them are eating fancy lunch, testing forty shades of blue, and putting together Stranger Things-themed costumes for the office Halloween party.
The promise of fame and fortune, Silicon Valley-style, means that design students continue to sacrifice their own humanity in order to create offerings for Dribbble, that insatiable cyberlord of user interface porn. The real winners here are those who forgo the quest for likes to focus on developing their own ideas and visual language. If they’re good enough and work hard enough, they get to engage with the tech world on their terms, and they can survive the bust that’s sure to follow the current boom.
So what’s a poor design student to do? You’re up to your nostrils in debt. Your parents have changed all the locks on the house. You’ve developed a considerable almond milk latte habit. Soon enough, you’re going to need a job. Here are some suggestions for how to think differently about building your portfolio.
1. Drop out.
Don’t mistake me for someone who agrees with the startup billionaire dropouts who casually dismiss the value of college. But if you think critical thinking is a waste of time, stop wasting your time. If all you want are skills, there are cheaper ways to get them. Go to boot camp, or night school, or YouTube. Plenty of people are hiring for skills regardless of credentials. That said, take care that your skills have some staying power. Woe to the paste-up artists and Flash developers!
2. Choose classes based on what you’ll learn, not what you’ll make.
What you make in a class is finite and static. It will always smell like school. It will often look like a second-rate version of something in your professor’s portfolio. Meanwhile, what you learn in a class is infinitely applicable to future work. It can be combined with what you’re learning in other classes, and become something bigger and richer than it was alone. Use your portfolio to build a case for who you are and what you’d like permission to do next. The work you make in school is evidence for that case, but it is not the case itself.
3. Own your work.
I don’t care whose class you made something for or what the assignment was. Tell me what you made and why. Tell me how you got to this solution. Tell me what you learned. Show me where you are in the project. Show me the creative twist. Show me the point. If you can’t, leave the project out, no matter how pretty it is. Your portfolio should be yours. And if it’s truly yours, it will be materially and clearly different from every other portfolio, even if everyone’s using the same template. What is a job? It’s people asking you to use your skills to do their thing. Use your time in school to make something that’s yours alone. And once you’ve made it, own it.
4. Be careful what you wish for.
Your portfolio says everything about who you are and what you can do. If your portfolio tells me you’re a Photoshop wizard, then that’s what I’ll hire you for. If it tells me you can make anything explode in Cinema 4D, I’ll hire you for that. But I won’t be much interested in your opinion on what we’re making or why. Being amazing at a complex piece of software today is like being amazing at taking dictation fifty years ago. It’s a valuable skill. It will get you a good first job. But if you want to move up the food chain, being known for having deep technical skill in one area probably won’t help you. Do you want to excel at bringing other people’s ideas to life? Or do you want to be asked for your idea?
5. Update your definition of a good portfolio piece.
When a professor tells you you’ll get a great portfolio piece out of her class, ask her what she means by that. Maybe she is still getting paid to make the type of design that is so often associated with portfolio pieces — things like food packaging, magazines, or logos — but hardly anyone else is. Just because a piece is easy to represent in a portfolio doesn’t mean it’s a good portfolio piece. Start by deciding what story you want your portfolio to tell, then figure out what to show and say. Today’s designers are increasingly expected to be systems-thinkers, good collaborators, and agile learners. Process images and written explanations can be a better showcase for these skills than traditional product shots. Scrappy, weird, unresolved projects can make great portfolio pieces. Use VSCO to shoot a bunch of garbage knolled on a table — it will always look good. All it takes is a wall label to turn a urinal into priceless art.
Your portfolio should be a birthplace for future work, not a graveyard for past work.
For that to happen, your portfolio has to demonstrate more than what you’ve done. It has to show who you are, how you think, and what you have to offer. That might mean it doesn’t contain any “portfolio pieces” at all.
Rachel Berger is a graphic designer in Oakland. She is chair of Graphic Design at California College of the Arts. She holds an MFA from Yale.
