Top Tips from Saatchi & Saatchi

'We see a lot of student work at Saatchi & Saatchi Design. But no matter how great the work may be, simple mistakes in presenting your work can be distracting and frustrating. The ones who get the portfolio right are already one step ahead of their peers. So we thought we’d share some tips to help you make your portfolio show your work in the best light possible. Follow the tips below and let your work speak for itself.

1. Keep it relevant. Demonstrate your understanding of the company you’re applying to – for example at Saatchi & Saatchi Design we are branding-focused with a corporate bias. Put your work in the relevant discipline up front. Show us you’ve done your homework and aren’t sending us the same file to a dozen other agencies. This doesn’t mean you should exclude your work in other disciplines (e.g. photography, illustration, etc) but keep in mind you portfolio should convince the recipient that you are as a good fit for what they do.
2. Show multiple applications. Consider the breadth of real world applications. A single logo and letter head only tell part of a story. Show a wide variety of applications, e.g. signage, vehicle graphics, TV idents, website and social networking pages. Take a look at the student work at Brand New Classroom for some great examples.
3. Let your work breathe. Focus only on one project per spread, but don’t feel limited to just one spread if the project merits.
4. Give proper credit. If you’ve worked on group projects, let us know which aspects you worked on.
5. Label your file clearly. Make sure your name and contact details are in the folios of every page of your document. If your file gets printed out and shown around, you want people to easily identify you and know how to get in contact with you.
6. Send a single pdf file. Pdf is an industry standard format and can be read on mobile devices. Avoid Word documents, or multiple jpgs.
7. Keep your file around 5Mb, no larger than 7Mb. Many corporate email clients can’t accept attachments larger than 10Mb, so you want to keep well under. Make sure you optimise your pdf export settings, use RGB rather than CMYK (3 colour channels take less space than 4) and set your JPG compression accordingly. Avoid rasterising vector graphics except in the case of extremely complex work. For more information on optimising the size of your pdfs take a look at this tutorial on the pdf optimiser tool.
8. If you have a portfolio website, still send a pdf file. Sometimes being able to print a self-contained document is just easier. Send us a selection of your best work in a pdf and link it to your website for anyone who wants to take a more in-depth look later on.
9. Put your CV at the end of the document. Your work is far more important than your CV. Let your work to show us your skills. Keep the CV to a single page and keep it at the end of your pdf.'

found on their site http://saatchidesign.wordpress.com/

Business cards

Portrait or landscape, I haven't decided yet and it still needs some tweaking, but I am pleased with how the logo takes shape on the card and can't wait to get them printed.

Presentation

Here is my end of year presentation that sums up my final year and demonstrates my design practice direction, skills I have improved on, contacts and placements visited, an action plan for now and short term plans after degree completion:

Open publication - Free publishing - More graphic design

Updated identity

After working on my final major project briefs and focusing down my umbrella statement to 'typography and layout for publication and design for print with an interest in hand drawn type and photography' , I realised my original identity didn't really represent the designer I wanted to instantly get across. I wanted a more detailed, hand drawn feel to it so I drew my name based on my favourite typeface, the Lady René font, and mixed handcrafted and digital to hopefully get across a fun but professional approach.

Diverse Placement II

On the 2nd day at Diverse I set to work on finishing my proposal design for Silcoates. I'm really glad I got to work on it more as I feel it looks a lot more completed now to be able to show the client. Obviously Sue and the client will change bits of it and tweak it here and there, but for a proposal idea I am pretty pleased with it. I stayed within the guidelines that Silcoates wanted so hopefully I will get good feedback from them. Sue said she will pass on their thoughts after she has been to visit them and let me know how it went.

Below is my example of the front cover design and a front page and double page spread layout for the Sports section. We thought it would be a good idea to use a different colour for each section, so I added a colour palette at the end to show the client what the other sections would look like.

After working on this, I worked on a different project for the rest of the afternoon that Sue was also working on. She has been designing a publication for a company that send out seasonal issues so this one was the winter version for January. Overall for Sue this is quite a big job and there's a lot to do in terms of the layout and trying to fit in all their stories, images and articles without altering the overall look that runs through each issue too much. I helped by working on one of the double page spreads and had 3/4's of the spread to work with fitting in the article and a few images. I loved this project and the challenges that it brings.

My first attempt below was very much how I'd have liked it to look, with lots of white space and a creative layout, but then I realised it didn't fit the theme of the rest of the publication.

My second attempt worked a lot better for what they wanted, but it needed added details to fit in right.

Here is the 3rd version, not too different from the 2nd, but I began to add in borders, and section a quote out from the rest of the article to split the text up a bit. This isn't quite finished, but it gives a better idea of what the client wants.

As well as working on the projects, I spent a bit of time over the two days chatting about my work and showing them what I have been working on recently and they showed me their portfolio and some of the clients they have worked for. It was really nice to see how their projects were developed and I saw a few examples of how they had designed on mountboards to present to the client instead of it always been digital or powerpoints, etc. This is very similar to how we display our work at the minute so that was really interesting. 

Overall, I had a thoroughly enjoyable time, got loads out of the experience and will definitely be staying in contact with them and hopefully if they have any work over a busy period that they need a freelance to work on, I might be able to help them out, which would be a really exciting opportunity for me. 

Diverse Placement

Today was my first day working with Diverse Design & Communications and I was set the task of working on a proposal design layout of a yearbook/prospectus for Silcoates school in Wakefield. My designs will be taken to the school for them to decide if that's the look they want to go for so it was very much a client driven brief with a set of guidelines I had to follow. I really enjoyed working in this way as I have only worked on one live brief before this where the client had a big input on the overall design, so this was great experience.

Sue, the designer at Diverse, gave me the main outline of the brief and there were certain restrictions from Silcoates, such as ensuring I use the school colour throughout, use Lucida Sans font with no uppercase, etc. I set to work on the cover design and one section within the publication that will be presented as an example to Silcoates. Throughout the day I created several versions that followed their rules, but I did try to be a bit more visually creative with how I could show these and stretch the boundaries.

Here is the chosen cover design (for now) and a couple of my ideas for the section spread that we decided to go with and plan to work on further on Monday when I go back:

Portfolio for Diverse

In preparation for my visit to Diverse on the 12th they had asked to see some of my work so I put together a simple portfolio to show some of the range of work I have done so far. This will hopefully soon have a lot more 3rd year work in it so I can lose some of the 1st year designs that are not all high quality finished projects and I can work on putting together a professional looking portfolio and layout.

Open publication - Free publishing - More portfolio