Organization of a Portfolio

Organizing your work
Tips on presentation

Organizing your work

You can organize your work a number of ways:

• categorized by type of project
• categorized by the skills demonstrated
• ordered by your estimation of the work's quality
• ordered by the relevance of the work to your goals

Whatever organization plan you use, pick one and stick to it. The reviewers of your portfolio will be looking to see if it is organized consistently and clearly. Consider including a table of contents, and make sure the organization of the portfolio is reflected in it. If you do use a table of contents, you may not need to include page numbers on it because your portfolio is not likely to be long enough to need them. The table of contents will serve more as a rough guide and an overview of the portfolio's organization than it will a specific navigation aid. If your portfolio is online, you will have to include some kind of top-level menu that serves this purpose.

You may decide to order your work by relevance or by quality, and provide an indicator on the annotation pages of the specific skills the work demonstrates. This method allows you to organize the portfolio on two levels, without adding so much complexity that viewers are confused or distracted by the organization scheme itself.

Many professional portfolios are constructed with the resume or vita in the back. If you chose to put your resume/vita in the back of your portfolio, you should put some identifying information (your name!) in the front of the portfolio, and you should turn in another copy of your resume/vita with the required materials that accompany your portfolio.

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Tips on Presentation

Left-hand and right-hand pages

Right-hand pages in a print portfolio should never be left blank.
Left-hand pages in a print portfolio may be left blank.

Whole documents

As a general rule, avoid including whole documents. In an online portfolio, provide more than just a URL to another website as an example of your work.
Choose meaningful excerpts from documents. In an online portfolio provide small scale versions of those excerpts and link them to larger versions.
If you include a whole document, you may punch it and bind it directly into the portfolio or, in online form, include a link to download the document or to open it as a pdf file. If your role on the project was specific to certain sections of the document, highlight those sections.
Another option for including a whole document is to bind it separately from the portfolio, and indicate in the annotation that the document is available (either in the back of the portfolio, as a document download for an online portfolio, or on request).

Do not allow the structural elements (banners, rules, identity graphics, topic headings, and so on) to dominate the screens or pages of your portfolio so much that your artifacts are no longer the focus of attention.

Pay attention to the visual quality of the excerpts you use. If they are reduced in size, either in print or online, watch out for images breaking up nd for text that looks as though it should be readable but is not. In print a reduced image containing text should be readable even if it is quite small. Reduced images online must be linked to larger versions in which the text is readable.

Your portfolio should represent your professional self and be appropriate to the context in which you work now or hope to work soon. In most cases, this means it is not the place to indulge your fondness for cute kitty pictures, Nascar racing logos, or snapshots of yourself on vacation. For online portfolios especially, be sure the design of your portfolio is clearly delineated as your professional image.

One of the primary challenges in producing the portfolio lies in writing the annotation. Pay attention to the annotation, and leave yourself enough time to write and revise it. Although it will not be as personal as a diary or as informal as email, it should sound as though you are a real person. Be sure that your annotation reveals the way you think as a designer and the reflection you have done as a professional. Avoid bragging on yourself or sounding apologetic for your work, but don't avoid discussing the important decisions and accomplishments represented by the artifacts you are showing.

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