Top 10 Tips and Torments of Creating Your Portfolio

Creating your portfolio is one of the harder things you must do as an aspiring creative. You need to go through your entire body of work and pick only a few pieces that

• Represent you as a creative.
•  Show that you have good ideas.
• Show that technically you are skilled in Art Direction or Copywriting.
•  Differentiate you from other candidates.
•  Make your future employer love you.
• Make your future employer believe that they need  you on their staff.

On my journey to becoming a professional, here are the top 10 tips and torments I have experienced in creating my portfolio.

10. TIP: Choose your best work. TORMENT: Choosing your best work.

How do you know what your best work is? Personally, I am only putting campaigns in my book that I believe have smart ideas, show the type of work I like to create and that have been received extremely well by teachers and/or clients.

9. TIP: Create a thumbnail image that makes you want to lick the screen. TORMENT: Creating a thumbnail that makes you want to lick the screen.

Teachers tell us to create appealing thumbnails for our campaigns that make the person want to click the campaign (so, essentially not a plain background with the logo of the brand). I have chosen high res images that are bright and/or are intriguing to look at.  Here are some samples:

(I really hope you are licking the screen right now).

8. TIP: Explain your idea in 3 sentences or less. TORMENT: Sometimes you just can’t.

As an art director, sometimes getting to the point in 3 sentences can be really challenging. In my portfolio, I asked a copywriter to review the meta-descriptions of the campaigns. He made some great changes and the descriptions are much more to the point.

7 . TIP: Include pieces that say something about you. TORMENT: What do you mean by that? 

To me, this is the most frustrating piece of advice. I do want my employer to get a sense of who I am, but my “personal projects” aren’t an example of my best or smartest work. Finding what you have done to represent what kind of person you are can be hard, especially in school when you don’t have much time for “personal projects”.  I chose to include 10 magazine covers that I Photoshopped my dad into, which was something I did for fun. I believe (hope) this is what they mean by a personal project.

6. TIP: Always include award-winning work. TORMENT: I haven’t won any awards…yet.

This is something I struggle with in my portfolio. I have not won awards like D&AD or Future Lions, but I have been a finalist for (and won) in-school client pitches. I decided, however, to remove this commercial from my portfolio because I know it wasn’t my best work. The struggle of putting together your portfolio is real!

5. TIP: Make your portfolio picture memorable. TORMENT: Why wouldn’t you remember my face?

I’ve seen many students’ portfolio pictures. Some are clean head shots while some are students wearing goofy outfits. It’s a challenge to find something that is professional, yet interesting enough to make it your portfolio picture. Always make it a head or bust shot because full length body shots are too small to identify the face of the person. I decided to showcase my skill through my photo, so I created an illustrated self portrait. For your viewing pleasure:

4. TIP: Showcase quality work, it’s not about quantity. TORMENT: But I’ve worked so hard.

Since I have been in ad school I have done so many campaigns. Probably at least 30 ones that I am proud of. I would love to show all of them since I worked hard on all of them. This was the best advice I was given, delete what is not as strong as other campaigns. I have spent this past week doing more deleting than I have adding anything new

3. TIP: Show the strategy in one slide. TORMENT: Creating info-graphics that live up to the idea.

When you are presenting your work to a class you show different slides of the insight, the strategy, the competitive analysis, the reasons to believe, etc. However, the advice we get is that the creative work should be so good that the strategy and insights and ideas are implicit in the work. So, I have been told to create an infographic that includes that information all in one slide. As an art director everything has to look cool, so this is just frustrating when preparing your portfolio.

2. TIP: Check and re-check for spelling or grammar mistakes. TORMENT: You are too close to the work you don’t see the mistakes anymore.

This is where a copywriting or editing friend is essential in your life. If you don’t have one, hire an editor. Spelling or grammar mistakes distract the reader from your work. It just makes you look sloppy. (If you are an Art Director, you are obviously anal about every detail in a color or layout, so don’t get lazy about your words.)

1. TIP: Be yourself. TORMENT: But who am I?

If you don’t really know who you are at this point in your life, I promise you ad school will help develop your creative personality. You will have to work on so many campaigns and think about so many ideas, you will learn who you are and what you like. You will see how you are alike and especially how you are different from the people around you. By the time you finish your time in ad school, you will know how to be yourself. I promise.