nowWhichway – photography and design

Digital Portfolio Submissions

Last week the third year students had to submit a digital portfolio by mail. The plan was to identify potential clients and tailor a promotional piece that would attract their attention and get an appointment to show a tangible portfolio, which should (perhaps, maybe) lead to a job.

There were three questions everyone needed to consider:

What kind of photography am I good at?
Who will buy these type of pictures (commercial or fine art)?
How do I convince those people to hire me (give me an exhibition, buy my prints, etc.)?

Consequently it takes a bit of honest soul searching to try and figure out what kind of career you want, and what you are good at. The end of your third year of college is a good time to figure this out, but I’d hope people have been thinking about it all along.

So some of the digital portfolios were excellent, some were pretty good, and some needed a lot of work. Generally, the quality is obvious from the moment the prospective client, in this case me, opens the envelope. Some people take great care to present their cd with a nice label, cases with a printed insert, and a few even made their own letterhead. (I seem to remember I covered designing letterhead in the first class last autumn…)

Here are a few examples, good and not so good. The first one came in an A4 envelope, with a plastic folder, cd case with label, business card and letterhead all with the same design. Excellent, except the cd didn’t have a sticker on it.

Christina Ebel

Hand written notes on the sleeve aren’t so impressive.

Handwritten note

Here was an attempt at an insert for the case, but the cd has a label made from plain paper, cut out very badly using scissors or a butter knife. No way would anyone put that into their computer. I tried to take the label off, but the edges are loose and the glue underneath is gooey, so I hardly think anyone will get out the white spirits to clean it off. It will just go in the bin.

Bad labels

Here is a great label, great image selection. Looks great opening the envelope. Could use a better printer, but still looks really nice.

Nice, well designed label.

I suggest creating a portfolio as an Adobe Portable Document Format(PDF). It gives you total control of the layout and will play on virtually every computer. Many people do them as Powerpoint files, but I find that program more difficult to create the appearance I want, and I’ve seen a lot more Powerpoint files fail to open than PDF. With both programs, problems arise when the images are embedded as hi-res files. If your .pdf or .ppt is 100mb, you should realize you have a problem.

File size is important, but so is page size. Some people designed their .pdf for the printed page, A4 vertical, so then the client has to shrink the display so it fits on their screen. It leaves a lot of empty screen space when viewing the portfolio. It is better to design for a 1024×768 pixel size. That is virtually the minimum screen size now. It lets you maximize the size of your images and hopefully create more impact with the audience.

Most important: Show your best work, without any filler shots. Research prospective clients and target the portfolio to the type of work they use. Make every part of your portfolio, from business card to end title page, show your creativity and professionalism

Filed under: Uncategorized | Photography, photography degree, Portfolios, self-promotion|1 Comment