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hi there my name is Taylor and today I want to share with you my portfolio that I took to universities when I was applying for my graphic design course when I was applying to study graphic design I want to share this because of the fact that when I was making the portfolio I struggled to find good examples of other people's portfolios and so I found it really hard to judge whether mine was any good or not what my chances of being accepted were so I'm sharing this so that you can get an idea of what it takes to get to where I am maybe you'll find some useful ideas as well there are a few considerations I had to make when designing my portfolio this is a visual course so I had to demonstrate that I could create good work I also needed to have an opportunity to talk about the work rather than just showing the visuals having the story behind it it needed to be really portable because I was taking me all over the country it also needed to be big enough that I could show things at scale I could present things nicely I needed to show that I cared about the portfolio so that it showed I care about the course that I was applying for so although the portfolio is only ever used for me to get onto the course I put a lot of time and effort into it in order to make sure that that represented the time and effort I would be putting into the course I was applying for so with that in mind my portfolio looks like this in this black case let me show you now okay so I went for a three size because it gives me plenty of space to show off the work and what I did was I had my work printed on this thick card so as you can see this is a stack of cards and each one is I think around 250 GSM paper I had this printed at professional printing company and I think it makes a really big difference to how the work looks you can see the images are really quite good quality anyway started with my name it's quite important for when you can't be in the room to talk about your work so I started with a page of some of what I've been reading I thought it might be nice to show kind of swear some of my inspiration was coming from and then this project I put first because at the time it was by far my largest portfolio piece so this is work for a festival which involved a lot of different graphics and video and photography work each project has a small description just a couple sentences really and each image has a caption as well photos that I took from events and here's a record of some of the things that I was involved in here's a photo of me on the radio and doing photography and also a lot of our work published in the newspaper so at the time I made sure to make a record of all of these things so that I could show them in my portfolio Sonic Youth's is an organization where I live that showcases up-and-coming music artists and this is where I really started doing gig photography in fact it's where I kind of started photography at all the reason I bought a DSLR was to take photos of gigs this is one I'm quite proud of actually the Green Party has got a strong presence where I live and I really like the work that they do so at the time I did a lot of volunteering work for them this has turned into paid work over the past couple of years but yeah at the time I did some work for them on a voluntary basis this project is by a book publishers specifically for entrepreneurs so a lot of these books were to do with self-improvement and I was commissioned to do a couple of book cover designs for them here you can see a lot of the process work that I went through and showing process work is especially valuable during interviews because they really like to see how you went from the start to the end of a project it continues again this is me demonstrating slightly different skills here I did some hand-drawn typography this is the first and the last time I've really done it but it shows that I am kind of capable of practicing some slightly different skills wasn't it this design was never actually made but showing in a mock-up really doesn't make a big difference to the look and feel of your portfolio this is a real client brief I met the owner of patrician a networking event and since then I've been producing the marketing material for him he does nutritional takeaway food it's very healthy and it's especially useful for people who are training health coaches nutritional experts things like that I broke down why I made some of these design decisions often the person interviewing you won't really take the time to read all of these little details but if they do it's really good to show your attention to detail there you'll notice that it's a very consistent portfolio the photo is always presented in the same grid captions always in the same font and at the same size and that's really important again to show organization um this was my first ever client Integra aerospace in fact the owner of Integra aerospace is my mum's boss and that is how I started freelancing this was my first ever client project producing these infographics and I still remember how I produced them in Photoshop which is really not the right software to be using since then I've done quite a lot of work for him again showing some of the process sketches here this was a self initiated project for my EPQ or extended project qualification at sixth form I decided to study design for social change this was a project that I did in order to fulfill that qualification I produced a branded campaign on raising awareness for wildlife bridges which are crossings that are built across roads in order to allow animals to cross safely they're really successful where they've been tested so I created a logo and social media touchpoints and I'm really proud of this one because this was not a brief given to me by a client but just something I felt was important to make this is an Instagram account that I ran from September of 2016 onwards because I wanted to learn how to use Adobe Illustrator and I wanted a way to motivate myself to keep learning and also to share the things that I was learning so I created an Instagram account and started posting things on there at first every single day and then it slowed down as I got on actually this was a really good project to show because it showed a lot of real consistency and hard work by the time I went to my interviews I had 16,000 followers and as it stands now I think it's around 18,000 so that was a really good example of taking my own initiative and working on a project of my own this is a printing Museum in the city where I live in fact it's one of only a couple in the country so it had a massive collection of screen prints and letterpress equipment and really old printing equipment from the last one 200 years and I decided to go in there and volunteer I ended up volunteering there for about a year met some amazing people most of whom were pretty old but I learned a huge amount just by hanging around with them and seeing how things used to work here's just a spread of some photography I wasn't really sure if this was important or not but I wanted to show that I had kind of developed a range of skills so as well as graphics I also had the photography and then finally I wanted to show a couple of small projects that weren't worth a sheet of their own album covers logo business cards right at the very end I had a page here which would link people to my website I did bring my laptop with me to interviews and I had my website ready to share but I think it was only in one interview that they really needed to see that in the others by the time they'd seen all of the work I think they kind of made up their mind I do recommend that you have a website available because sometimes that's all you'll be able to show them and you can leave it with people as well if you have the website link then they can access it at any time having having a portfolio website put together is surprisingly uncommon I think a lot of people don't take the time to really make their work presentable online and yet that's it blank on the back so that was it and after they had seen the portfolio we had usually a long conversation about the industry about my understanding of the course and then ten minutes later I would take my portfolio and head home and a couple weeks later I then got the results in total I applied for five arts universities and they were the London College of Communication Bournemouth Bath Falmouth and Leeds in the end I was accepted to four and I was rejected by Leeds which was their loss if you asked me some feedback I was given on the portfolio they liked the fact that there was just a small amount of text because they didn't want to have to do lots and lots of reading but they did want to know that there was a story behind it they also seemed to really like to be able to spread all of the sheets out on the table and look at them simultaneously so I'm glad that I didn't bind it in that way my advice for any body making their portfolio for university applications would be to think of your portfolio as a project in itself don't just take the work you've done and put it together and take it along I saw a lot of people turning up with massive folders stuffed full of unorganized papers and it just doesn't communicate care and attention I think it's really important to craft your portfolio for the lecturer because they see you know in those interview rooms there were 40 50 other people just like me but with more qualifications so I really had to show that I cared by putting that portfolio together start early as well because I got mine printed from a printing company that took a bit of time and so I needed to do revisions at one point and I'm glad I left myself a couple of days buffer so that I could get those reprinted if you leave it too late you will probably end up attending the interview feeling like you've forgotten something or missed something and the last thing is just that really it doesn't matter that much the lecturers are definitely there to interview you as a person because you're there to learn how to produce work what they really want to see in the interview is that you are an interested and an interesting person and that's regardless of your portfolio when you walk in put your portfolio on the table show them what you need to show them maybe don't treat it like a presentation treat it more like a conversation starter and they really want to spend that time speaking with you and your opinions and your thoughts and how you arrived at these things I think that's just about all I have to share but if you're interested in seeing more of the projects I've done for clients then we know and thank you for watching I'll see you soon [Music]