Hasta La Ideas

The Class of 2012 in Industrial Design at the University of Cincinnati had a problem our book reviewer can sympathize with: ID books rarely show process, yet portfolio presentation requires the viewer to understand the underlying thinking in a matter of seconds. Furthermore, most ID schools don’t run those students through the paces of Photoshop or InDesign that is requisite for putting their work in the best light. With their new book The Portfolio Handbook, the University of Cincinnati Class of 2012 asked people in-the-know how a portfolio should be structured so you wouldn’t have to.

The book begins with a light tone, framing portfolio design questions as coming from little South Park-headed personas asking (and answering) naïve questions. Each section is introduced by the talking heads and often followed with shots of students working on prototypes or huddled around walls of Post-it notes. Those shots serve to illustrate that the students have done the work they’re explaining, and that the same structures that underlie classroom teaching and presentation apply to portfolio layout.

Four years of work is difficult to condense into a single portfolio, so they begin with a survey of working designers. The designers they surveyed placed the highest value on quality of ideas and conceptual sketches, placing less importance on finished designs, renders, 3D models or prototypes. Those are the same skills most non-specialized employers require, but portfolio construction is slightly more complex. Communicating the quality of ideas requires two other skills that don’t score so highly: storytelling and graphic design, so the Handbook spends the bulk of its pages on that foundation.

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