We are proud to present you to the third monthly column, the Creative Columns & Marketing Mondays have been around for a couple of months, so here’s what’s fresh: “The Design Discovery”. Every 2nd Thurday of the month we’ll publish an article on discovering your true design skills, the real design industry strategies and more design profession related secrets will be unveiled. Written by our Asian design counterpart of the Studio469 team, these articles are designed to equip you for the real-life design industry. So enjoy the first article which is about discovering your own design persona, regarding to your portfolio.

More often than not, fresh graduate designers have found themselves searching for a design job, unaware of what they are capable of. Hence, when it comes to interviews, they fall short of showing their unique design capabilities, which makes them stand out from the others. Also, in wanting to pursue a Masters program, they can be still uncertain of the course they want as they have yet to discover what they can do with their innate design qualities. My advice is, always shape your portfolio in such a way that it enhances your design strengths and shows your unique persona. Read the rest of the column to find out about some of the different styles of design portfolios defined, and identify your own design persona:For designers who are strong in explaining their concepts process, a design process portfolio is a good approach for designers to fully explain the strengths of their design through explaining the research, the inspiration and features of their designs. Such portfolios are good for presenting for design scholarships and masters design programs, where the interviewers look into how you think through your design process to impress them. People who use this approach have a tendency to be long-winded though, so this might bore the people who read your portfolio. Therefore, make each concept in your portfolio like your song - make the lyrics melodious, sweet to hear, but not long!

On the other hand, there are also other designers who are capable of very specific skills like professional sketching or photo-realistic 3D rendering. In this case, presenting a design skills portfolio will be suitable, where this will focus on only showing the design areas that you are really good at, rather than elaborating the whole design process. Such portfolios attract interviewers from companies, especially those that operate on specialised design management strategies. They see the potential in hiring you for what you are good at. Good as it may look, your portfolio scope may lack an overall depth of concept understanding, if you do not show enough design process to explain your design concept. So do pepper your designs with more design inspirations and ideas to create that extra flavour.

In today’s world of accelerated design pace, the learning process widens as more software tools and skills need to be learnt for designers to thrive. Therefore, those who are versatile in different design platforms - from sketching, rendering to even animation, can create a design variety portfolio to try elaborating on their design knowledge for different design tools. Such portfolio’s show the design adaptability of an individual. As many companies today operate on different design programs; there are no synchronised design software tools used amongst all companies. Therefore, your versatility in various skills range will attract interviewers from companies doing generalised design management strategies. So, the more programs you know, the more they want you for your adaptability to mastering different design software tools. Like the saying goes,”A jack of all trades, but a Master of none.” While showing your design adaptability, you may run the risk of having no distinctive design specialty, and may be trying too hard to impress. Therefore, play your cards like in a poker game, only show out the cards you are confident of. That way, you will win the game.

Finally, designers who are great at packaging their design concepts, can actually create a design marketing portfolio with simple slogans to enhance their designs. Such portfolios are good in alluring business and marketing associates. How you package your design concepts and styles may be their answer to attracting their target markets. The danger of such portfolio’s is that sometimes it might be perceived as only “pretty”, if there is lack of credibility behind your concept. So try to enhance your design concept like a ice-cream - that needs to look good and also taste delicious.

A distinctive design portfolio shows your unique design persona and skills. So think about which of the above portfolios you fit in. Be true to your design philosophy, and let your portfolio show your design persona.

We await your comments on these different design persona’s, have you found your design portfolio persona, or do you think you are different? Let us know what you think. In the meanwhile you can head over to IDAsia.org to have a look at the portfolio challenge which is being hosted there, you’ll find the same portfolio persona’s over there so go ahead and send in your creative masterpieces to our collegues at IDAsia.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 0:00 and is filed under Column. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.