Selling 'Me'

Blog 11

Wk 11 – Selling yourself

A portfolio is one of the most important projects a designer can work on. Especially in product design. It is an opportunity for us to show off and show our best work. You curate it yourself. It is a fantastic way to present your best self and your potential to a company. As our placement period is slowly coming around the corner, I have the fantastic opportunity to put together my first portfolio this early summer. I will focus on three main concepts

1. Showing the Process: I want to show that I understand the design process. I want to show each company that I understand ideation, concept development, reiteration, refinement and how real projects are never linear, they often bounce back and forth.

2. Show the story: It is important to show how you think. This is done through sketching and asking questions along the way. This comes back to product designers being problem solvers, we must find the problems to solve. Show how YOU think differently from the rest.

3. Show your personality: I think this is an important factor, clearly show your style. From sketches to final products, show how YOU perceived the user feedback to create a design guide and how YOU used that design guide to create YOUR take on a product.

We learnt some hard truths about the real world and portfolios. Regarding a viewer of your portfolio, 90% of the decision is made in the first 10 seconds. The average time spent on the first review is 60 seconds. The viewer is looking for a decision trigger. This can be good or bad. Ultimately you have control but you should curate your portfolio knowing these hard truths.

I know that there should be a (concise) storytelling aspect to my portfolio. In which I show my thought process. This can be a major plus as the reviewer could agree with how you approached the brief or certain design decisions. An example of this could be things such as me refining a design to reduce costs and prevent an over-engineered product. The reviewer might think this would translate well into a real-world and a business cost context. The overall goal of the storytelling aspect is to show the background of how you came up with this design solution. Presenting the background information will create an empathetic reaction.

In the early summer, I will work on my portfolio. I will first polish off old projects. Enhancing sketches and perhaps adding a professional finish. I think I will do one or two self-led projects, just to show my initiative and intuition. I also aim to improve some hard skills such as my rendering and app making using Adobe XD or Figma. I want to also just do more woodworking projects as I haven’t been able to with my college and part-time work.

My main goal for this summer is to secure some work experience. I am hoping to reach out to a local architect who I have already worked with before and get some part-time experience there. I think this would be invaluable to me as a design student.

Exciting times ahead.