Designing a good portfolio
– May 6th, 2015 –
It’s 1998 and I’ve just arrived in Bangkok
and it’s 90F at night. I’ve arrived at a small hostel just around the
corner from the Khao San Road and, just like everyone else travelling or
on a gap year, I’m a walking stereotype. From my flip flops, overly
loose trousers, consumption of banana fritters and cheap Thai beer. Oh,
and well-thumbed copy of The Beach.
Like I said; a walking stereotype. Except for lugging around the 2kg
A3 sized portfolio case rammed into my already weighty backpack.It’s 1998. The web is still in its infancy, but it’s there and pretty good. Fireworks was on version 1. I used Internet Explorer 5 and Eudora The first iMac had been recently released. Not really the dark ages, but here I am, lugging around an additional 2kg of dead trees for two months around South East Asia. Why? Well, I wanted a good job when I got to Sydney. And, as a designer, a good portfolio – or ‘Book’ as it’s called in advertising – would get me one.
Let me back-peddle a bit to my first job as an intern at an ad agency in Manchester. There worked an Art Director called Tom. Tom was quiet mannered, quick to smile and laugh, and much quicker to point out a small opportunity for improving a design. Together with the other Art Directors, he taught me about hierarchy and how to make type fit on a page (this was a distinct problem when designing plumbing catalogues). But he also taught me the value of a good Book. How to design one; how to tell a story through your work; how to present your work and do enough in the portfolio to get you a foot in the door which is what junior designers needed so much back then.
“Leave your book and pick it up tomorrow”
My experience of looking for a job early in my career was probably quite usual amongst my peers: I never replied to a job advert. Instead, I was encouraged to get together a list of the places I’d like to work and then to sell my portfolio around them. So, there I was; fresh out of school, full of ‘I got a First Class honours degree’ confidence selling myself from agency to agency. It was a baptism of fire. I remember the first day was particularly horrific. Out of the six or so agencies I’d arranged to visit, only one was happy to let the art director see me rather than just leave my Book and pick it up tomorrow. And then, my work was systematically ripped to shreds by an Art Director with too little time on his hands.Now, this isn’t meant to sound like ‘oh, woe was me and my hard time finding a job’. But, I am trying to recall how my portfolio was the start of a conversation. And, generally, a conversation I wasn’t there for. I didn’t really plan for that so had to adapt the work to invite that second meeting.
Oh, those soft skills
So much of what we do is working with people. Sometimes, though, I think I need to have experience in counselling or negotiation tactics in order to usher through design changes which impact organisations at their core. It’s difficult work. And, if you’re not the type of person who like talking to other people, then the impact of your work will only go so far. The question is, how do you demonstrate this in your portfolio? How can you demonstrate the value of design games, or collaborative moodboard exercises? Or that it took six months of negotiating with dozens of facets of an organisation in order for a content strategy to be adopted? My advice would be to write a story. Show photographs of workshops. Demonstrate how you approach these things. List the methods you’ve used and those that have worked. List those that haven’t and the reasons why.This may seem odd for a portfolio, but if you think about it, design agencies have been doing this for decades. This is because they have similar problems. A lot of agencies sell the process of design, not the end result. In order to charge money for things like strategy, research, collaboration and what-not, all of which is difficult to show in a piece of design, they have to demonstrate it in other ways; case studies, stories, photographs. Packaging the work to show the full range of what was worked on.
A few pointers Tom gave me (and a few of my own)
Let me take you back to Manchester in 1995. I think it was early in a week in July. It was probably raining, as is usual in my home city. Anyway, Tom and I are discussing university and where I’d like to work and doing what. I start talking to him about my final year and the projects that await and he begins to advise me on not leaving my portfolio work too late. That I should be working on it throughout my final year and how I shouldn’t under-estimate the amount of work it will take. A year! Surely it couldn’t take a year, I said. It’s just a dozen prints after all. ‘No’, he said. ‘It’s probably the most important piece of work you’ll do in your final year, and one you won’t get marked on until you try and find a paying job’.Over a nice hot cup of tea, he and I chatted for an hour or so about what makes a great portfolio and all of the things he considers when a dozen or so would land on his desk every single week. At the time, this was for a print portfolio, but looking at these now, you could easily see how they’d apply to all types of portfolio, including those for a small studio or agency.
Here are the highlights…
Snapshot
Who was the client? When did you work on this. What was the Date? What was your role? What was the value to the client? But keep this brief. This meta data way-finding is important when skimming through a portfolio.Show a progression
Show work that didn’t cut it. Demonstrate your ability to change and iterate and show variance to get to a solution. This also demonstrates your graphic design capability, copywriting, and visual thinking.Be honest
If you worked under a senior, say so. Talk about why projects might not have been completed. Honestly, if you bend the truth, it’ll catch up with you at some point.Breadth
If your work is just a bunch of posters, of a certain type of client or work, then it’s easy to pigeon hole you. If you just design icons, that’s the type of work you’ll get. Demonstrate breadth, even if it means working on your own side projects or setting yourself your own briefs.Fewer and better
Be very, very picky about what you show. If you only done three projects you are really proud of, then just show them. Talking passionately about how it went, what your contribution was, and what happened after it was finished will shine much brighter than ten single pieces of work. It’s easy to spot things made with care and love, even those commercial projects that fell short of the mark (and it’s ok to say that if you know the reasons why).Walk the walk
If you can code, then demonstrate it. If you can’t, be clear about why you don’t think that’s applicable for your role and growth. Either way, conviction in your own abilities or not will tick boxes.Work is more about pictures
The big difference between junior designers on the web and print is quite stark, but the more experienced you become, the roles become similar. It becomes less about pretty pictures, and more about facilitating a process from beginning to end. Think about how you can convey something before hand that isn’t a picture. This is where writing about your work trumps showing pictures. Because sometimes there just aren’t any pictures to show.And, the last point I think nicely rounds off this post.
It’s the start of a conversation
This was applicable when I started my first job, when I ran a small agency, and now I work in-house at Monotype. Any portfolio is the start of a conversation. It needs to invite discussion, further questioning, and that all important call-back.Going back to that stereotype traveller type, wandering around Asia with an extra 2kg in his backpack… Well, I arrived in Sydney. I had a very short list of studios I wanted to work for and proceeded in doing what I’d done before: making myself a nuisance until I had the opportunity to either leave my Book, or talk it through with someone. I managed to get the job I wanted with a great little company in Sydney called Spike. It was my first web design job. All thanks to Tom and his advice. And a sturdy rucksack.
A Design SDK
– March 16th, 2015 –
A software SDK
is a set of tools that allows the creation of applications for certain
software, or video games, or a hardware platform. A hit could be as
simple as a bunch of APIs or software that talks
to embedded or proprietary systems. An SDK is a collection of tools to
make something with. It’s a leg-up for development. And they’re needed
for design, too.
Guide me, don’t tell me
When working with identity guidelines, pattern libraries, or styleguides, the biggest pushback I hear from designers is ‘I don’t want to be this specific. Point me in the right direction, but don’t be prescriptive’. The chances of a pattern library or styleguide answering every design problem that comes along is slim, but providing an overall understanding of a system is probably the best position you can put a designer in in order for them to do good work. That, and providing them with the right tools.Giving someone a design SDK may be better than asking people to look for, navigate and understand an entire website dedicated to your design language.
For example, let’s say you work for a large bank in their in-house design team. Your design language is years old and grown organically to become a place of internal collaboration for stakeholders and silos – not really the place for external suppliers. One day, you need to get a very small web project designed and your team is maxed out so you outsource it to a freelancer. Now you’re faced with a problem.
Your design language documentation and collaboration site is housed internally, behind the company firewall, and you can’t give her access. You try to collect some material together for her, but it takes all morning before you even have an idea of what might be needed. And then you can’t find the logo in the right format. All you really need to do is send her what is needed and nothing more.
All of this takes too much time. And a styleguide doesn’t solve the problem. A design SDK is what you need.
A style guide is about providing the right help for every use case all in one place. An SDK is about providing the right help for a specific environment. In software development, APIs may have middleware wrappers like a PHP and Ruby. But regardless of the wrappers, the endpoint is always the same: the software at the end of the API. In the same way, a Design SDK should provide an end-point — a design language — typically via different methods such as HTML and CSS, or Sketch files, or Photoshop files, or text documents, or InDesign swatches.
The key to this is to be where the designer is. Learn where your designers and design partners do their work and provide tools that help get your design language adopted in those tools.
The problem with style guides
Style guides can be great for documenting a design system and providing a way for design to be consistent across multiple projects, products and people. But they can also be a shackle for creativity. A firehose of difficult to navigate content that compromises clarity for brevity. The key thing with style guides is they rely on you going hunting for what you need. They are everything for everybody. They are pull rather than push.A design SDK I’m talking about is push rather than pull. It’s given to you, and it contains just what you need and nothing more.
What would be in a design SDK?
The key here is to provide just enough for someone to get going with their work. For some projects, this may be all of the following, but for others, it could just be a couple.- Moodboards and inspiration
- HTML boilerplate
- CSS or Sass snippets
- Template assets
- Suitable example images
- Icons in various formats
- Licensed typefaces or links to the correct typefaces
- Branding identity guidelines
‘Isn’t this just for big, in-house teams and projects?’
No, I don’t think it is. There were plenty of times when I ran my design agency that we could use a design SDK as a deliverable for a client. Because, after you have finished working with them, chances are they will need other people to take forward your design in one way or another. And maybe the client isn’t the best person to determine what is needed to do that. A design SDK would be a great deliverable to ensure design integrity is maintained after you move onto other projects.Visual Design might be a thing
– February 2nd, 2015 –
If you recall, a few years ago, I wrote about my belief that the term ‘visual Design’
was propagating through the UX community and the potentially damaging
effect that was having on the problem-solving roots of graphic design
practice. This was swiftly followed up by a longer piece for The Manual.
I’ve had a lot of comments from people since then – either agreeing
or disagreeing (y’know, the web) but over the past six months or so I’m
coming around to the idea that Visual Design might actually be a thing.
It’s just incredibly rare and is dependent on a number of rarely
addressed factors.Following the problem
Michael Bierut explains in his piece ‘You’re so Intelligent’ that graphic design has long suffered from what he calls ‘Problem Definition Escalation’:Like many designers, for years I used a tried-and-true tactic to hoist my way up the respect ladder, a technique I will here call Problem Definition Escalation. If you’ve listened carefully to the lyrics to “Gee, Officer Krupke” in West Side Story you already know how this works. The client asks you to design a business card. You respond that the problem is really the client’s logo. The client asks you to design a logo. You say the problem is the entire identity system. The client asks you to design the identity. You say that the problem is the client’s business plan. And so forth. One or two steps later, you can claim whole industries and vast historical forces as your purview. The problem isn’t making something look pretty, you fool, it’s world hunger!This behaviour is everywhere I’ve looked and worked for my whole career. From designers to content strategists, product managers to researchers. Almost always though, unlike Mr Bierut, I don’t think this is a need to elevate ones self through any sort of professional low esteem. I like to look at this a different way.
This is a result of people trying to find the problem. It just so happens the problem is rarely the logo.
From board room to your users and everywhere in between
If you think of Visual Design as being on top of a stack of other activities and functions, it might look something like this:- Visual Design
- Stuff
- Customer needs / Value proposition
- Board of Directors / Leadership
- Organisation environment / culture
Customer needs have to be balanced with the product value proposition and opportunity. This is built up on a capable and supportive leadership team. But the bottom layer is probably the most important of them all. The environment.
The environment has to be right for all of the other things to happen. Unfortunately, ‘environment’ or company culture is hard to define and replicate. But how we use processes – such as agile, or defining market opportunities, through to how you refer to customers and evaluate designs - is probably the most important of them.
The Problem Story
It wasn’t until I saw Leisa Reichelt talk through how the UK Government Digital Service team work – from the Creative Director through to the developers and researchers – that I saw a corporate culture and structure where Visual Design could be a thing. Why? Because the problems had been defined, researched, worked through, solved, iterated upon in the layers below. Doing this means that probing the problem results in answers quite quickly. And the more the problem is probed, instead of it all unravelling, it builds into a cohesive narrative. The problem has a story that can be easily tracked back.Visual Design might be a thing
If the problem has a story that can be traced back, the environment is supportive, and answers are available, then I can certainly see instances where designers learn not to go hunting for the problem. And, thinking about it, I wonder if this behaviour is more probable in in-house work, rather than agencies? Why? Because agency designers are used to clients coming to them with bigger problems than they initially present. This is how agencies generally get more work from larger clients – we follow the problem and, together, make projects to address them.But, anyway, back to visual design.
If the problems are solved. If the designer is used to not going hunting for the real brief. Then, and only then, I think visual design could be a thing. When a designer has the right information, is working on the right graphical problem where she can focus on, what Michael Bierut describes as:
our miraculous fluency with beauty, our ability to manipulate form in a way that can touch people’s hearts… the gifts that matter, and the paths through which we create things that truly endure.Yeah. Maybe that’s when visual design might well be a thing.
Adventures with Plex
– October 10th, 2014 – I’ve written before about going completely digital for our home entertainment. To recap: I have a big, shared hard drive attached to an iMac that two Apple TVs share to using ATV Flash This was fine for a while, but, frankly, ATV Flash is a little buggy over our network and the Apple TV struggled with any transcoding (converting one file type to another) and streaming – especially in HD. So, we needed something better. In steps a few things: Netflix, Plex and a Mac Mini.Plex has been on my radar for a few years and up until recently didn’t really make much sense for me. But as ATV Flash was becoming more unstable as Apple updated their OS, then Plex started to look like a good alternative.
The hardware
As you may have read from my older post, I did have shared hard drive with all the media on hooked up to an iMac which the Apple TVs shared into to browse the media. The issue here became network and sharing reliability. Quite often, the shared hard drive was invisible because the iMac was asleep, or the network had dropped. Sometimes this happened in the middle of a movie. Not ideal.The new setup is almost identical, but instead of using the Apple TVs as hardware to browse the library, they are now being used just as a device to Airplay to. I barely use the Apple TV UI at all. Browsing from my iPad and then air playing to the Apple TV. What’s cool here is that the iPad just acts as a remote, the file itself is being transcoded on the server and just pushed to the Apple TV directly.
What about a standalone NAS (Network Attached Storage)?
Plex does run on a NAS , but the issue there is most consumer NAS boxes don’t have the hardware grunt to do the on-the-fly transcoding. So, I finally decided to ditch my iMac in favour of a headless Mac Mini to run as a decent media box, running Plex.Getting started with Plex
- Download it. Get the Media Server on your computer or NAS of choice (Plex has huge device support). Also, get hold of the mobile apps. Once you’re done there, download Plex for your connected apps: from Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, Roku, Google TV or native Samsung apps and, now, the Xbox One, too. The app support is really quite incredible.
- Plex Pass. Even though the software for Plex is free, there are some additional things that are left for a subscription that you have to buy. The good thing is, you can get a lifetime subscription and the cost is very reasonable at $149.99. For that, you get early access to new builds, syncing content remotely, things like playlists and trailers. But the killer feature of the Plex Pass is the ability to create user accounts for your content. Now this is something I’ve been after for ages on the Apple TV, and even more important now my eldest daughter regularly watches films on it. I need the ability to filter the content appropriately for her.
- Setting up a server is a breeze. Once you’ve installed the server software, get yourself a user account on the Plex website and set up a server. This launches some web software for you to start adding files to your libraries and fiddle away to your hearts content with all the settings.
- If you did get the Plex Pass, I’d recommend creating multiple user accounts and playlists with the features Plex Pass gives you. The way I did this was to have email addresses and user accounts for server-plex, parents-plex and kids-plex. server-plex is for administering the account and has all the libraries shared with it. ‘parents’ for Emma and I, and ‘kids’ just has the ‘children’s’ library shared with it. Now, by simply signing in and out of the iPad, I can access the appropriate content for each user group.
Next up: streaming, or ‘How do I watch the film on my telly!?’
There are a few options:- Native apps (Samsung, XBox One etc) These are apps installed directly on your TV or Xbox. To watch your content, simply fire up the app and away you go. Yesterday, I installed the Xbox One app and was up and running in less than three minutes.
- iOS and Airplay This is what I described earlier. Simply download the iOS apps and hook up to your plex server. Once you’re done, browse your library, press play and then airplay to your Apple TV.
- iOS and Chromecast Exactly the same as above!
Disadvantages: From what I understand, adding Airplay into the mix does have a slight performance hit. Not that I’ve seen it, though. I’m only generally streaming 720 rather 1080 resolution, so the file sizes are coming up against network limitations. I do expect this to change in the coming years as resolution increases. Advantages: It’s a breeze. I use my Plex app on my iPad, choose a film or TV show I want to watch and then just stream it via Airplay. When I’m travelling, I take a Chromecast with me to plug into the TV and stream to that (more on that in another post).
‘Hacking’ the Apple TV
Currently there is no native app for the Apple TV, but there is a way to get around this by ‘hacking’ the Trailers app to directly browse your content on your plex server using PlexConnect or OpenPlex. Now, there’s a lot to read to get up to speed on this, so I’d recommend a good look through the plex forums. I followed the instructions here to install the OSX app, add an IP address to the Apple TV (to point to the plex server) and, so far, so good.To be honest, though, I tend to just Airplay these days. The iPad remote / Apple TV combination is quite hard to beat. It’s fast, flexible and stable.
Is this it for my digital home needs?
For a good few years now I’ve been looking for the optimum solution to this problem. My home media centre needed the following:- Multi-user accounts
- Full-featured remote
- Large file format support
- Manage music, photos and movies
- Fast transcoding and streaming (minimum 720)
Who knows how long I’ll stick with Plex as I do have a habit of switching this around as often as I change my email client (quite often!). But, for now, it’s working just fine!
It's not you, it's me
– September 7th, 2014 –
Dear web conferences,
It’s not you, it’s me. Something’s changed and it’s not your fault. I’m
just on a different path to you. Maybe we’ll be friends in a while, but
at the moment I just want some space to do and try other things.
I still love you. But we just need a break.
Love,
Mark
I’m taking next year off speaking at web conferences. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say, or contribute, but more that I have better things to do with my time right now. Speaking at conferences takes about two weeks per conference if it’s overseas once you factor in preparing and writing the talk, rehearsing, travel, and the conference itself. That’s two weeks away from my wife, my daughters, my new job and a team that needs me.
Two conferences the world over
What I’ve noticed this past year or so is, largely, we have two different types of web conference running the world over: small independents and larger corporate affairs. The former is generally run by one person with hoards of volunteers and is community-focussed (cheap ticket price, single track). The latter is big-budget, aimed at corporations as a training expense, maybe multi-track and has A-list speakers.As well as these two trends, I see others in the material and the way that material is presented. ‘Corporate’ conferences expect valuable, actionable content; that is what corporations are paying for. Schlickly delivered for maximum ROI. ‘Community’ conferences have their own trends, too. Talks about people, empathy, community, and how start-ups are changing the world. Community conferences are frequently an excuse to hang out with your internet mates. Which is fine, I guess.
My problem with both of these is I’m not sure I fit anymore. I’m not what you would call a slick presenter: I ‘um’ and ‘ah’, I swear, I get excited and stumble on stage in more ways than one. Some would say I’m disrespectful to the audience I’m talking to. I’m lazy with my slides, preferring to hand-write single words and the odd picture. I’ve never used a keynote transition. I’m not really at home amongst the world’s corporate presenters who deliver scripted, rehearsed, beautifully crafted presentations. They’re great and everything, but it’s just not me. Not for the first time in my life, I don’t quite fit.
And then there’s the community conferences. I feel more at home here. Or at least I used to. This year, not so much. A lot of my friends in this industry just don’t really go to conferences that much anymore. They have family commitments, work to do, and – frankly – just aren’t that into getting pissed up in a night-club after some talks with 90% men. Younger men at that.
Time for something different
All of that may sound like I’m dissing the conference industry. That’s not my intention, but more like a realisation that, after nearly ten years at speaking at events, I think it’s time I had a little break. Time away to refresh myself, explore other industries that interest me like typography and architecture. Maybe an opportunity to present at one of these types of conferences would present itself; now that would be cool.I know it’s a bit weird me posting about this when I could quietly just not accept any invitations to speak. To be honest, I’ve been doing that for a little while, but not for the first time, writing things down helps me clarify my position on things. For a while I was angry at web conferences in general. Angry at the content, disappointed with speakers, disappointed at myself. Then I realised, like so many times before, that when I feel like that it’s just that my ‘norm’ has changed. I’m no longer where I used to be and I’m getting my head around it.
It’s just this time, I’m going to listen to my head instead of burying it two feet in some sand.
Laters.
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