-: Hi, everyone, and thank you
for joining today's session,
Presenting Your Portfolio.
This event is brought to you
by the members of AIGA,
the professional association for design.
AIGA, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization,
advances design as a professional craft,
strategic advantage and vital cultural force.
If you're enjoying this free webinar series
and are in a position to do so,
please consider making a donation
via our Facebook page.
That's facebook.com/aiga design.
Today's webinar is part of our programming
dedicated to helping you tailor your portfolio
to your next opportunity.
This includes a brand new week-long portfolio festival,
July 14th through 18th,
which will be a week-long virtual event
for mentorship, collaboration and learning.
Now it's my pleasure to introduce Lee-Sean Huang,
host of AIGA's Design Futures Now podcast,
co-founder of the design consultancy Foossa
and design educator at NYU, SVA and Parsons.
Please welcome Lee-Sean.
-: Thanks so much for that introduction, Susan.
Now it is my pleasure and my honor
to introduce our special guest presenter
of the evening.
Leon Rodriguez is an instructor
at Art Center College of Design,
as well as at the University of Southern California.
He's also the director of education
at AIGA Los Angeles, and president
and creative director of LR/LA,
which works with top-tier museums,
cultural institutions and private clients
on 3D storytelling experiences.
So I'll turn things over to Leon
for the presentation, and then I'll come back
for the Q and A.
-: Thank you, thank you.
It's so great to be here.
So exciting.
Okay, everybody,
I'm gonna walk you through a presentation,
5 Tips for Presenting Your Portfolio Over Zoom.
I know this is content that people are hungry for.
I can't believe there's almost
just short of 400 people watching
in the actual webinar, and maybe even more
out there in the world.
So wherever you are, thank you so much
for joining us.
Before we get into really talking about
the five tips for presenting over Zoom,
I thought I'd just share a little bit about me.
I think it's really important for you
to understand the context of what
we're talking about here today
and a little bit about my story.
As a young designer, a young person,
I was always very curious.
I was very independent and I hated authority.
I was a terrible student,
and I pretty much did whatever I wanted,
whenever I wanted, which is, I'm sure
you know, a bad idea.
I can't remember a single day
I wanted to go to school.
I much preferred drawing and painting
and building and breaking things
and playing baseball and ice hockey
than I did to going to class.
Luckily, I was a pretty terrific athlete
and I was invited to attend a high school for sports.
I then went on to college,
really to a great college
I was really lucky to attend.
And by the time I reached my sophomore year,
I sorta, when I realized that graphic design
and design in general was even really a potential career
that would be good for me.
So I focused on my interests.
I continued drawing,
I continued building, and I studied advertising
and graphic design, and even did
some very early web-based experiences.
This was a long time ago.
After college, I returned to Los Angeles.
That's where I'm from
and where I'm talking to you from today.
I was lucky enough to find a job
at the Getty Museum.
I always loved art and was intrigued
by the concept of doing graphic design
in three-dimensional space.
And the Getty Museum
was an amazing learning experience,
where a really independent and tactile learner
could learn to think
and learn to be an exhibition designer.
I spent nine years working there,
learning about art,
learning about how to present art
and learning about how the interpretation of art
and all of the amazing related stories
can have a dramatic impact
on changing people's perspectives
and enriching their lives.
I started my own design studio in 2007.
It's called LR/LA.
That studio, which I still manage today,
I mean, I always felt like
it was more than an exhibition design,
and I call the work that I do
three-dimensional storytelling.
And over time,
I moved personally from executing design
to strategizing about design,
to shaping narratives for clients,
then to reshaping their brands
and moving on into more consulting,
which is how I spend a lot of my time now.
So into 2015, I started teaching,
first at Art Center College of Design
in graphic design and environmental design.
I started teaching at USC's Iovine and Young Academy
a little over a year ago,
where I'm teaching in both places
about storytelling and strategy
and all iterations of design.
And I'm also the director of education
at the professional design organization
AIGA in Los Angeles.
And every April, we stage a portfolio,
big portfolio review event.
And this April, like everything else in our lives,
we did over Zoom.
So to help people
better use the features of Zoom
and understand how to present their portfolios
over Zoom, I built a video, which is on YouTube
at the AIGA LA
page, and you can check that out there.
So this talk that I'm giving today
is kind of an expanded version,
it's sort of a 2.0 version of that.
And really, through all these things
that I've done, I mean, the talking about my life
and the work that I've done
and on this trajectory,
I feel like I've always had a single focus
to try to find a deeper understanding,
you know, through design, because I feel
that through only really like hunting
for that deeper understandings
can we really improve ourselves
and hopefully the world.
Oh, I wanna show these doggies again.
These are my doggies.
That's Rudy and Alice.
They're here somewhere, probably.
They're not in this room.
They're probably eating something somewhere
that they shouldn't.
Okay.
So the 5 Tips For Presenting Your Portfolio Over Zoom.
Before we get into the tips, though,
let's talk a little bit about
something that I think is really important
in every meeting, and like this presentation
is a little different than most.
I feel like everything that I talk about today
is something that you, as a designer,
can take away
and apply in your life
and apply in your design practice,
apply in your portfolio.
And I think we all, as a design industry,
need to be leaders.
I think that's what design
really needs to be doing right now
and how we need to be acting right now,
as leaders of culture and leaders of style
and leaders of thought.
Part of being a leader is making an agenda.
So I think at least seeing an agenda
written down gives everybody a sense
of what we're gonna be doing,
and it allows me, as the leader today,
to sort of steer the conversation.
So three big things on the agenda today.
I'm gonna do my very best to give you
a super informative lecture with a few fun visuals
that are gonna help you.
Then I'm gonna embarrass myself as much as possible.
And you'll see these lecture,
this lecture concepts in practice.
And then we're gonna have a Q and A.
And please, please, please,
at any point in this presentation,
if there's something you don't understand,
something you wanna learn more about,
something that you feel
that you don't agree with,
please ask a question about it, write it down,
put it in the chat, put it in the Q and A.
Whatever the method is online, please do that, too,
'cause I think we wanna be able
to answer as many questions as you can.
Every agenda should have goals.
And I just have one really simple goal today,
and that is to really try to make
each and every one of you just a tiny bit
more confident in your ability to present,
in your ability to be a good designer,
in your ability to maybe help other people
find a deeper understanding.
As this is a design conversation,
I think that every conversation
about design must first,
we must first understand the context
of the conversation, okay?
So the context of the conversation today is,
of course, we are in the midst
of a global pandemic.
That's the reason why we're even here today, right?
We wouldn't be doing this
if that wasn't the case,
which maybe is a small benefit,
a weird small benefit.
We're also facing some really unpleasant realities
about America today.
These first two aspects of this context
are weighing on all of us all of the time.
I can't engage in any conversation
without addressing, at some point,
one of these two ideas, right?
At no point are we free from these things.
These are affecting us every moment of every day.
And then, of course,
we, as designers, people,
family members, partners,
whatever it is that we're doing,
we all still have to do all the things
that we need to do every day.
These things don't go away.
But the first two items
in this context really force us
to think about some of these things
in a slightly different way.
So let's talk about that for a second,
how this really relates to your portfolio.
We all have choices to make.
We could pretend that these things
aren't affecting us,
or we could ask ourselves
what we'll do in this moment.
I think it's kinda cliche when people say it,
but it's so true.
Like, how will you spend your time
isolated from people?
What will you do?
Less cliche, but potentially more important,
how will you, as a designer,
combat systemic racism?
What is it that you're doing?
We can't ignore these realities
of this context ever.
They're always present in every conversation we have.
And, of course, we have to continue
doing the work that we must do.
So this is the work that we're doing today
is helping you build your portfolios, right?
And this is really important,
understanding this context,
and these two aspects of this context,
in particular, because of this image, right?
If you show an image like this in your portfolio,
it's communicating a lot.
It's communicating that you,
potentially, aren't acknowledging
the context that we are in.
I see this in everybody's portfolio that I review,
projects that were designed six months ago
that are no longer relevant.
Projects that we
are really, really proud of
and that are really great,
but parts of it that, even in my own portfolio
when I talk to clients, I realize, oh,
I just can't share that in that way.
This view of life
doesn't really exist for us anymore.
Our view of life looks more like this.
One thing that I think
you can take away from this
is that this is an opportunity for us, right,
as designers to look at the projects
that we've done, to look at the work,
the great work that we've done,
and make sure that we are acknowledging
our context that we're in and taking a moment
to make some tweaks in our portfolio to say
this is what our life looked like six months ago,
this is what it looks like today.
And acknowledge that and potentially find some innovation,
find a new idea, find some way of addressing
and expressing an idea that you
simply couldn't six months ago
because of the situation that we're in today.
And this brings me to the concept
of really thinking about your portfolio
as a design problem, right?
If you're acknowledging the context,
the design problem changes.
So it's really important for you to think about
how our realities affect what we do
and don't put in our portfolio,
and how that it affects this design problem,
your portfolio, or any design problem
that you're facing.
When I gave the original video,
when I built that original video,
I didn't really talk about the difference
between your portfolio website
and a presentation over Zoom.
I just kinda mushed them into one big idea,
and, obviously, they're not.
And so I think that when
we talk about a design problem and sort of the purpose
of your portfolio website,
it's really important to really dive down
for yourself and really think about like,
what is the purpose of this portfolio website?
And how do I make a distinction
between this portfolio website
and my presentation of my portfolio in person?
They're two different job,
two different tasks, two different jobs,
even though they have the same content, right?
So for your portfolio website,
obviously, you're showing your skills.
Yes, right?
You're doing more than that, too.
You're showing an opportunity to show people
how to think,
how you think.
You're showing your experience,
of course, right?
Of course.
And but why are we doing these things?
I think a lotta people have the perception
that you build your website so that you
can get a job.
You build your portfolio
so that you can get a job.
But I think there's a really important step
that happens before you get the job.
Of course, you have to have an interview, right?
So when you're thinking about constructing
your online version of your portfolio,
really think about that as its goal.
And I think that can help you
to craft some of the language that you use,
putting the idea out there, right up front,
the kind of work that you want to do.
Moreover, when you
put this work out there
and people are reviewing your website,
I know that a lotta people out there
look at social media.
And I think it's really easy to draw
this connection between the way that people
who do this all day, like look at portfolios,
look at portfolios with the intention of hiring people,
when you look at an Instagram story,
you don't look at it for very long, right?
You very rarely read all of it.
You don't sit there until it flips to the next one.
You just move along, right?
That's this exact same way that people
review your portfolio for a job.
And it's not to say we're gonna hire you
or not hire you.
It's to say, we're gonna put you into the pile
of people that we wanna consider more closely.
And then maybe they'll invite you for the interview
and then maybe that's when you'll show
your presentation, your custom-crafted presentation
that is your website,
but we'll get into that in a minute.
So the online version
is definitely different.
And then, so what is the purpose
of the presentation,
Zoom portfolio presentation version?
That, of course, would be to hopefully
get you hired because it's an interview
at that point, right?
Okay, so what are we doing interviews for?
Why are we getting interviews?
We want internships, right?
I know internships
have been absolutely massacred by COVID.
Maybe that's not a good word to use.
They've been canceled by COVID.
I look at this website, is my internship cancelled,
from time to time.
It hasn't changed a whole lot,
but of the 538 people
that responded on this self-reporting site,
195 of them have reported
that their internships have been canceled,
and another 163 have been made remote.
That is a lot of change
in a very short period of time.
Internships are still out there, though.
If you hunt, if you need them,
I think it's late in the summer for internships,
so I'm not sure if that's as relevant
as finding an entry-level job.
Just for a little context,
I do this all the time,
look to see how many jobs are actually out there.
Look to see what the quality
of those jobs actually looks like,
like what the potential of them is
for young designers.
In the United States today,
if you do a search on Indeed for designer,
there are over 10,000 job opportunities out there
that include UI/UX, graphic design,
digital design, product design.
I live in Los Angeles.
I do this, also do the search
for digital designers in L.A. all the time.
There are 530 job listings
for digital designer in Los Angeles today.
Today.
Some of those are for very well-known companies.
And I think that it's really important
for you all to know,
despite it feeling like times are tough,
yes, they are, but there are also
lots of opportunities out there.
And I think that all of you
who are passionate
and interested enough
to participate in webinars
like this, to learn more,
you are gonna set yourself up
for being at the front of the line
for these opportunities,
so good on you, good job.
I feel like I'm a really optimistic person,
maybe optimistic to the point
where it's unrealistic,
but I feel like when I'm working,
that's the only way that I can bring out
the best in myself and my team.
And what that forces me to do in this time
is to think about challenges as opportunities.
My optimism forces me
to think about challenges as opportunities, right?
We can go back to the context
that we're looking at today.
We can think about all the things
that we're kind of stifled,
how we're stifled,
how we're confronted by these things,
how they can really be emotionally difficult
to get through.
I was at an AIGA event,
sort of hosting an event recently,
and Melinda Livsey,
I don't know, I'm sure a lot of you
are aware of her, she was a speaker at this event
and she talked about the importance
of being invaluable in uncertain times
and ways to do that.
And she said something that was amazing,
that I really appreciated,
which was that you shouldn't wait
for someone to hire you
if you want to work for someone.
She said that you should do something useful
for them to get their attention,
which I absolutely love that as a concept.
And it's just a different way
of thinking about the challenges
that we have and turning those challenges
into opportunities and doing what designers do best,
which is think about something
in an innovative way
to overcome an obstacle.
What she said specifically,
as an example, was she recommended to someone
to go into this person's Twitter,
look at all of the ideas
that they've built over time,
and build them an outline for a book
and send it to them
and see what they had to say about it,
just to get their attention.
I absolutely loved that.
It takes a lot of thought
to get to that point.
All right, we made it through
understanding the concept,
the context, for today.
So let's talk about
these sort of five specific tips.
I'm gonna fly through these
as fast as I can.
Some of them will take a little bit of time,
but we'll fly through.
Tip number one, "make sure your tech is ready for Zoom."
Everybody here is online.
Everyone here is,
most likely, listening over WiFi.
I know that sometimes WiFi can be a challenge
when you've got a house full of people.
Your family's trying to watch Netflix
and you're trying to give a presentation,
and you probably shouldn't be fighting
over that, that bandwidth.
So what I would highly recommend
to everybody to avoid that is buy yourself
an Ethernet cable, very inexpensive on Amazon
or wherever you wanna buy,
and plug it right into your router
when you're ready to give a presentation
just to really make sure
you're not gonna be challenged.
Tiny details in your presentation,
the presentation of yourself, presentation of your space,
make a really big difference.
Backlighting is great, but be very,
very careful not to backlight yourself over Zoom.
It takes away from you
being the center of attention,
which is exactly what you should be all the time
when you're over Zoom.
If it's noisy in your space,
if there's a lot of ambient sound,
I deal with this all the time with my dogs,
with my family, with the phone ringing,
which could happen at any time,
it's a good idea to mute yourself
if you know you're in that situation.
And I'm sure everyone knows how
to mute themselves, but maybe what you don't know
is that you can temporarily unmute yourself
by pushing your space bar.
I feel like this is a fun little tip
that not everybody knows.
"Tip two, reading the room."
You should really try your best
to let people know that you are listening
when you are in your little,
tiny little Zoom windows.
Body language is very difficult sometimes over Zoom.
You're in your tiny little box,
you're way over there on that little screen,
and it's sometimes hard to see you, right?
According to a 2020 study,
which I was reading recently,
nonverbal communication makes up,
this sounds crazy, it's not crazy,
93% of our communication package.
93%.
That doesn't necessarily mean body language,
but it does mean
other things as well, you know?
So I think body language is a big part of it.
And when we are able to emote more
in our expression and be more present,
it makes a really, really big difference.
So how do we go about doing that
as a person who's on the other end
or a person giving a presentation?
Make sure you're centered in your square.
It seems simple.
Some people have difficulty with this.
You'll sometimes see people,
I'm gonna mess with my screen,
they're in their thing and they're doing,
they're like this.
And I'm just like, hey, what's going on there?
Are you doing that on purpose?
It feels like maybe you are.
You should try your best
to use expansive body posture
if you are giving a presentation.
In Zoom, you're in your tiny window, right?
It's just like this and this,
and there isn't really a lot that you can do.
But if you have the opportunity
to use expansive body posture,
meaning be open,
have your center open.
If you close your center
and you kind of sit like this,
then people aren't as,
don't view you as being in a leadership position.
This is something that you can find
in a lot of research and data online
if you're interested in researching it.
It's always a good idea to make sure
you're looking at the camera.
Looking at the camera, essentially,
is looking into the eyes of the person
that you're having this conversation with, right?
A little trick that I think is kind of interesting
if you're having a one-on-one
Zoom, you can go into
gallery view and put the picture
of the person you're talking to
right underneath your camera.
So it kind of looks, you know,
you kind of cheat you looking into their eyes.
It's kind of a cool little trick.
All right, and finally, designing your background.
Your background says a lot about you
and about your
level of commitment
to this conversation, right?
It truly does.
You should be the art director
of your Zoom window.
So how can you do that?
As you can see, my background is really simple.
And like I said earlier
about backlighting yourself,
you want to maintain yourself as the focus
and center of attention in your window, right?
So you, of course, could use the Zoom backgrounds
if you're in a space where you don't have
a white wall like this behind you.
By the way, I moved all kinds of stuff around
to get this setup.
If you can't do that, some people can't,
I totally get it, it's fine,
you can use the Zoom backgrounds.
They're pretty good.
If you don't wanna use the Zoom backgrounds
and you wanna do something that's more unique to you,
I highly encourage you to do that, I love it,
keep it really simple, though.
And please, please avoid video.
It's far too distracting
and it takes the attention away from you.
This is your time
to be the center of attention.
All right, tip three,
be a pro.
This is a professional presentation.
At the beginning, I spoke a bit
about the purpose of your portfolio website.
And I think it's important for you
to make a distinction between your portfolio website
and this presentation over Zoom, right?
So how are these presentations different, right?
I highly encourage you
to not show your website over Zoom.
Why is that?
Well, your website that you've built,
or Dribbble or Behance or whatever presentation
you've created virtually
to represent your work,
is probably great and it's probably fine,
but that is a presentation that's intended,
it's specifically designed
to be viewed by the person
who's looking at it without you, right?
But the presentation that you'll give over Zoom
is one that is designed
to be with the presenter, right?
You're gonna be talking about your work.
Okay, so what I want you to do
is try to build something
that's unique for the situation.
And I know we've all seen lots of TED Talks,
and you should think about your presentation
that you're going to give of your work
a little bit like a TED Talk, right?
There's a story there.
There's a beginning,
there's a middle and there's an end.
And we should view this sort of beginning
of this story as the design problem
that you're solving.
And I really encourage everyone
to set up the design problem
that they're solving
long before I see anything.
If this is a identity design project
that you're showing, if it's a UI project
that you're showing,
if it's a flyer that you've designed,
all of those things exist for a particular reason,
they're for a specific audience, right?
So I think it's really important that you set up
as much of that as you can.
And just like a good TED Talk,
this setup becomes the hook
that makes people excited,
it gives them a sense of anticipation
about what's next.
And you can build on it
as you're going through your presentation
of your work, right?
So things that are really good
to include in this hook,
and I like to call it,
like we talked about at the beginning
of this presentation, the context.
You can talk to me about the design problem.
Obviously, it's an assignment
or some kind of assignment,
whether it's professional or it's something
that you invented on your own
or it's something that
is something from school,
they're all assignments, right?
So you need to tell me a little bit about them.
Talk to me about the subject matter,
talk to me about if it's based on your interest,
if it's based on your passion.
And I really just wanna know how you ended up there.
I'd like to know something about the audience
that it's intended for.
I'd like to know if you have had any insights
into that audience
as you're beginning to work.
I'd like to know what inspired you
to finding a visual in this project,
and think about it really as a hook.
It doesn't need to be complicated and long.
It just need to be enough of an interesting piece
of information that it gets me excited.
The second part about being a pro
is please, please, please,
don't read long bits of text
in your presentation,
and please don't ask me to do that, either, right?
You're here to talk to me,
and I really want our conversation,
our interaction, to be the focus.
And this is really your chance to tell me
juicy details about your project.
It's an opportunity to demonstrate
that you're a really good communicator,
that you can, maybe you have a sense of humor
about what you're doing.
And if you potentially speak another language,
it might be a really good time
to let me know that.
And all these kind of little details
that I would never know
if I were looking at your website,
this is your opportunity to share them with me.
Another thing, too, is it's really important
that if there's a lot of text
on a slide and it's small
and I'm trying to read it and you're talking,
it's really confusing
to know what I'm supposed to be doing
as a person who's on the receiving end
of a presentation.
So I would say if you want me read something,
just send it to me and I'll read it,
or leave it off entirely and you say it.
And, again, do your best not to read that information,
but know it well enough
that you can talk about it.
Back to the idea of the TED Talk and the hook.
Everybody loves a good story.
All of the best TED Talks are good stories.
All of the best presentations are good stories, right?
So find the story in your work.
Walk me through it.
Tell me why it's good.
Tell me the story that you,
that got you to the solution.
Tell me what the hook is.
Find the middle and the end, and lay it out.
Okay, this is the thing that I tell,
that's the most important thing
that I tell everybody about presentations
is please "don't tell me anything
"I can see by looking."
I think that everyone who reviews portfolios,
who talks about, who's part of presentations
of portfolio reviews,
they can see every design decision
that you've made.
Please don't tell me about those,
but instead, please tell me
about why you made them.
That's something that I could never know
unless you specifically tell me.
I'd really like to know about
if there was something specific
about the color palette in your project,
where that inspiration came from,
or you were inspired by the work
of a particular designer
that you absolutely love,
or maybe there's some insight
related to your audience.
Some of the same things
that we talked about in the context,
you could expand on those in your project.
Tip four, using the features of Zoom.
These are pretty much just very straightforward tips.
Sharing your screen, but please
don't share your whole screen.
As you can see
in the share window that you're looking at now,
you're really just seeing the presentation
that I'm giving.
What I'm seeing on my end, though,
is a presenter view, which we'll get to in a minute.
But instead of sharing,
when the share screen icon
at the bottom of your screen,
you don't have it now 'cause it's a webinar,
of course, but in a smaller sorta Zoom conversation,
click that button.
And then a series of windows comes up.
This requires that you do a little bit
of pre-planning to make sure
that your window that you want
to share is ready to share.
The one little downside to the way
that this works over Zoom, as you can see,
I'm not in full screen mode
because I'm using what's called presenter view.
And presenter view is amazing
because it allows me to see all my notes
and the slides on my screen
while you just see the presentation view.
But the one downside is that you do see the URL
and the name of that tab up at the top.
If anybody has figured out a workaround for that,
it would be awesome to hear,
but I don't think one exists yet.
If you are working in motion,
if you are working with video,
Zoom is pretty good about showing those things.
Sometimes it doesn't work as well as you'd want it to.
I strongly encourage people
to have their work, if it's motion or it's a video,
on a URL on their website,
but not a live one, like a hidden URL
that only you know is there,
that you can copy and paste into the chat
for each piece that you wanna share
so that if you want to make sure that
that video looks really great,
you can send it to the person in the chat,
and then they can look at it on their end,
and you'll know that it looks great.
All right, finally, the last of the five tips,
and this is the one that nobody likes,
you have to practice, practice, practice
all of these things if you wanna get good at them.
I said a lot in here, I know.
This practice tip is really the one
that matters most out of all of these.
If you don't practice setting up the context
of your project,
if you don't practice building a story
to talk about your project,
you are never going to succeed in doing it.
You must find ways to practice.
So let's talk about how you can practice.
There are 474 people,
oh, 475 people participating
in this Zoom webinar right now.
I don't know if there's a way for you
to share emails through the webinar,
but this just makes me understand,
it makes me know that it would be very easy
for you to go out there and find somebody
to practice with.
I think you all should try to do that
as best you can.
You all have shared goals, you're all trying to work
on the same kinda stuff, right?
So find somebody to do it with.
Finding a mentor is another
really great way to do this.
There are probably people in your life
who you could ask to do this with, you could mentor.
For me, the most satisfying kind
of mentorship relationships are one
where both people get something
out of the conversation
and learn something from each other.
There's a few really great resources
that I found recently, which I think
are worth talking about.
designed.org.
There's a lot of educational tools
and mentoring in this, through this website.
There's something called the Fellow app,
which provides mentorship opportunities
for women in advertising,
which I really think is great.
It's called the Fellow app.
Obviously an app.
The Fishbowl app.
Fishbowl app is also really similar and interesting,
focused on the world of advertising.
But in this Fishbowl app,
you can ask a general question
and you'll get many, many specific answers
from lots of different people.
Strive mentorship program connects black students
with industry executives, which is great.
And even the AIGA,
on the local level, through the local chapters,
many of them have mentorship programs.
And so most of these things,
I look for these kinds of things all the time,
and I just do a quick Google search to find them.
And truly, honestly, you will get
so much out of finding somebody out there
that can be a mentor to you,
but I think what you'll find
is that you'll have just as much
to teach them as they have to teach you.
This one is unbelievably terrible,
and I think it's probably the most useful
for all of you.
If you wanna practice these things,
if you wanna practice presenting a project,
there's no better way than recording yourself.
And then you have to do something
that is terrible, which is watch it (Leon laughs)
and hopefully learn from it.
But that's not the end, unfortunately.
You have to watch it
over and over again
until you're no longer horrified
of your own voice
and you can look at this video
and begin to make some objective observations
about what you're doing and how you're doing it,
right, so that you can begin to learn.
It takes some time, and I think
it's a really great thing for you all to do
and I strongly encourage you to do it.
All right.
One really great way to practice
is to watch somebody else do it.
So what I'm gonna do now
is walk through a project,
a little, simple project really quickly
so that you can see what I mean.
Talking for 30 minutes straight,
I need a sip of water.
Okay, here we go.
I have a friend,
the kind of friend that I think everybody
wishes they had.
He is thoughtful.
He is very giving.
He
is always the kind of person
who is ready to share anything
that you need at any time.
And he's also a person who
I really respect and I really want
to do my best to help him
feel good about himself, too, right?
And for his last birthday,
he wanted to have a big party
and to do something special for his party.
He wanted to take some friends out of town
and sit by the pool and drink wine
and do something wonderful,
which I fully endorse and I think is great.
And I need, of course, to give him a gift.
And I don't know what I could give, right?
He has everything that he wants.
He doesn't need much.
He doesn't really want anything that I could buy him.
So I think what I can do
as a friend is give him something
that is only something that I can do,
which is create something
and share it with him.
He's a huge fan of '90s rock music.
His favorite is Slash and Guns N' Roses.
He's seen them many, many times.
He's seen them on tour.
He's seen them in concert many times.
He's also a huge fan
of Van Halen, Eddie Van Halen.
And so we, in conversations with his wife,
we decided that we would build
a brand identity for his,
we would brand, (Leon laughs)
make a visual identity system
for his birthday party, right,
which I think is a really fun idea.
It's kinda silly, it's kinda fun, right?
Something any of us could do,
any of us designers could do.
But how will we do that, right?
Well,
we thought that it might be really fun
to think about his birthday
as a band, as a '90s rock band,
to build a visual identity for his '90s rock band,
which doesn't exist.
He's got a lotta guitars.
He plays the guitar.
He is a terrible guitar player,
but he still loves it,
and loves and has a passion
for '90s rock music.
His nickname is Gazzy.
And so, of course, his birthday,
it's his 45th birthday,
so we're gonna call it Gazzy 45.
That's gonna be the name of his band, right?
And so through the course of figuring out
what we were gonna do for this visual identity
for his party,
we didn't have a lotta time,
we didn't wanna spend a lotta money
and we wanted to figure out how we can do something
that I could really manage on my own,
do it quickly, but have a huge impact.
So I started to dig into things that, you know,
I'm a pretty good illustrator.
I could make something that had
a sort of a feeling of a hand-drawn
kind of vintage quality about it,
that had a little bit of a '90s vibe to it.
Sort of start to pick up some typography
from that era.
Maybe the combination of those ideas.
Sorry, we'll give you a little bit
of that '90s vibe.
And then, of course, picking up
on this sort of 45.
This particular 45 is taken directly
from a vinyl, a vintage vinyl album, 45.
So we put all those things in the blender.
Really thought about like, all right,
well, let's kick out something kind of interesting here.
So we first started with building this icon,
this logo for this party,
right, Gazzy 45,
which is kinda silly, it's kind of fun,
which that's all this thing's really supposed to be.
And then we started saying, I go,
"Why don't we take some of these photographs
"and make some sort of illustrated versions of them?"
So here's the Eddie Van Halen one,
here's the Slash one.
And then we thought, and then I thought, well,
let's start like figuring out,
we wanna make some really cool swag
and we wanna build this swag
into something that people will take home with them
and wear after this party
that can last a really long time,
that can be a really meaningful gift
for his friends, even.
So we built some hats.
We made some T-shirts.
These ones, of course, are mock-ups
and not the real thing that we ended up making,
but it worked really well
in a presentation form like this.
We looked at potentially making some stamps,
which we didn't do.
This is just a mock-up.
We did make a leather guitar strap
as a gift for him with this icon on it.
And the biggest thing that I spent the most time on
was making a coloring book.
I spoke with his father.
His father's a really great photographer
and has been photographing him
for most of his life, obviously,
as a father would do.
And we made a coloring book
of his life,
that each page was unique
so that all of our friends,
as they were recovering at the pool,
could flip through and enjoy
and potentially color as they wanted.
Another mock-up of a T-shirt
that we didn't actually make,
but then we also stuffed all of this great material
into this bag,
shared it with everyone at the party,
and everybody really enjoyed it
and it really made a meaningful experience for them.
And then now they have a little keepsake
of this event that they shared
with their good friend
and something that, me, personally,
I'm really happy that I was able to do.
So one little detail in this project
I think is really fun and interesting
and worth talking about in just
a little bit more detail
was how I built these images.
So first, I found these original photos.
And these are all just things that live online
and I just grabbed them.
And then made a pen drawing of them.
As you can see, there's like a little face
floating in space there above his head,
which, of course, is something
we didn't end up using.
And it took me a few times
to get this looking right.
Then made a sort of full vector version of it.
And then, through the course of realizing
that I needed to have something
that was a little bit less detailed
for something like those stamps,
made a version of it that was sort of,
maybe looked a little bit more like this.
And that is the end
of the presentation of this project,
and it's the end of the big presentation
of the five tips.
And we are now ready, just under 45 minutes,
for some Q and A.
-: Awesome, thank you (crosstalk).
Thank you so much for that presentation, Leon.
And thank you, everyone,
with all of your great comments
and questions coming through in the chat
on the Q and A.
Because there's so many audience questions,
I'm just gonna go straight there.
First, we have Jessica asking
is there basically any time
where a physical portfolio
is still relevant today, you think?
-: That's a great question, thank you.
The only time that I think it's relevant,
well, first off, in the life we live today,
the chance of you being able to meet someone
in person and share anything is almost zero.
So for today, no.
Maybe a year from now or maybe,
I'm not a doctor, six months from now, (Leon laughs)
I don't know, whenever, when you can
get back together with people,
if you have material that...
So always the answer to this question is yes.
And because you will meet people in person,
if you go in for an interview,
you will have to share something with people, right?
And so you're not gonna go in
and share your website.
You might share something digital,
and that's fine, or you might
share something printed, and that's fine, too.
But what I was originally going to say
was if there is something in your portfolio
that has a particular texture,
that is tactile in a way that it helps
to represent the concept, then definitely, yes,
share that in person.
Share that real physical thing if you can.
-: Thank you.
Leon, if you don't mind,
could you turn off the screen share
so then people can see us all big?
Great, thank you.
So we have another-
-: I don't really wanna do that, but okay.
(Lee-Sean laughs)
-: We have a couple questions from people
who have mixed backgrounds,
whether they're graphic designers and also artists,
or do ceramics, have other kinds of interests.
And so what are your suggestions
about mixing in some of your own creative
or artistic projects
into a professional design portfolio?
-: My recommendation
is to know the job
that you want and position yourself
as best you can to be most hireable
for that job.
So if you are a ceramicist
and you have five really great,
let's call it two
really good graphic design
pieces in your portfolio,
three that are just okay,
and you've got six ceramic things that you love,
if you're going to work as a graphic designer,
those things that, no matter how proud of them
you are of your work in ceramics,
they're not relevant for that job.
So I think that it's good for you to put,
to have maybe a subsection
on your website, off to the side,
another tab at the top, something like that,
where when you land, you don't see that work.
You don't see the ceramics work,
you see the graphic design work.
-: Thank you.
A similar question, this one from folks
who maybe come from less visual backgrounds
and then got into design,
like maybe they were a project manager before
or they were designed adjacent.
How do you suggest that they capture some of that
maybe less visually presentable experience
in a portfolio of theirs?
-: That's a great question.
And I think, again, it goes back to the,
almost the same answer as the last question,
which is what job would you be going after?
If you don't have graphic design
in your portfolio,
nobody's gonna hire you to do graphic design.
If you are a strategist,
and not a graphic designer,
I think that sharing your work as a strategist,
I think typesetting it well,
making sure that you're really clear
about the work,
the sort of the purpose of the work,
the context of the work,
the same as you would with graphic design.
You're just not showing
the execution of that.
You're really just focused on the beginning.
And if you have access to that execution,
you could show some of that, too.
I hope that answers the question.
-: Yeah, thank you.
I think there's some related questions,
so I'm stringing them together by theme.
Taft is asking about how do you balance
showing your research and your process
versus the final outcome or product?
You were talking about sharing the rationale
as to why, but how much of that
do you suggest actually putting in the portfolio
and how much would you save
for the presentation part?
-: Save it for the portfolio
being the sort of website version versus the-
-: Yeah, the website version or kind of writing-
-: The differentiation between those two?
Yeah.
Well, I think that
in an in-person presentation,
depending on the studio,
there's two ways to go about this.
So you could
include the most important aspects
of your process in there.
I think if you sketch with a pencil
and then you turn that pencil into ink,
and then you turn that ink into vector,
and then that becomes something interesting,
everyone will appreciate
seeing that over, that change.
If you wanna go more in depth than that,
I think it's a really good idea
to build some sort of a part of your,
almost like a sub-project,
within that presentation.
That gives you a chance
to sort of make the process,
viewing the process part optional.
'Cause sometimes it gets, like, again,
when you're looking, and I mentioned this
earlier in the presentation,
but if you're going to get
from the initial stage of the,
when you first submit your resume
or you first submit your material
and someone goes to look at your site,
you wanna get into the consider more pile.
And nobody's gonna good dive deep
into your process at that moment.
They're gonna look at your site
and determine whether or not
you might be a good fit,
literally within five to 30 seconds, right?
They're gonna look at your front page.
They're gonna look at the most important project,
the one that you're most proud of
that you put at the top,
and they're gonna see does this person
maybe have what it takes to do this job?
If the answer is yes, they'll put you in the pile
to go back and look at more later, right?
So if you're thinking about it through that lens,
then I think it's a really good idea
for you to build something
that they can go back and look at,
but isn't primary, isn't their primary view.
-: Right.
So similar question to that one,
there's a question about whether
you should create maybe two versions.
One is like more of a presentation deck
that's mostly visual,
and then another that's more of a leave behind
that has written-out case studies or process.
-: Oh, yeah, sure, well, I think a lot of that
has to do with the intention of the presentation.
If you are there to walk people through it,
then you don't need all of that language,
you don't need so much language in it.
You probably can have a little.
But if you are showing more strategy,
and that is the sort of focus of the work,
then that obviously will have a lot of language in it.
This sort of notion
of there being two versions of it,
I think, yes, there are at least two versions of it.
One of them is something
that's sort of for public viewing on a website,
and one of them is the more tailored presentation
that you would give in person.
So potentially, if it's that tailored version,
being two versions,
the tailored version that you would give in person
would have very little text in it
and very little explanation in it
because you would be telling people about the story
and about some of that strategy.
The one that you potentially leave behind
would probably have,
would probably be a beautifully typeset presentation
that included some of that information
that you would never give someone
instead of an in-person presentation.
They're two different purposes.
-: Thank you.
And do you have a suggestion
as to how many projects to include
in a portfolio?
-: Yes.
I like to encourage people to have
somewhere around like five in there
that they're really, really proud of.
And I think more or less is fine.
You don't need, certainly don't need 10, right?
That's way too many.
When you start sharing your work,
I think it's really,
it's hard for people to look at it
from the outside and understand what people
who are looking at it are seeing, right?
And if you're
showing a lot of work that has too much breadth,
it's gonna be harder for people
to think about you as a person
who can do the job you're being hired to do.
Like, you have three really good graphic design projects,
which three is plenty, if they're good.
Five is great, too.
If you have three good ones,
and then two, back to the earlier question,
two projects that are focused on ceramics,
well, that's almost as good
as not including them because they're just not relevant
to the conversation.
-: Thank you.
There was a clarifying question
on your suggestion of five projects.
Do you mean that for the portfolio presentation
or for somebody's website,
if they have like a public portfolio site?
-: Oh, yeah, sorry, great question.
I'm thinking more about
a recent graduate
with five good projects on their website is great.
If you're giving an in-person presentation,
yeah, three to five is great.
I mean, you know, you saw how I
went through that project and how long that took.
It was about 10 minutes or so, 15 minutes.
And I think that you can also,
if you're tailoring a presentation
in person or over Zoom, I guess it would be,
you could show two projects
that you really love,
have one other project ready to go,
and then have three other projects
with little, really important examples
of work that you're really proud of
that are maybe smaller, right?
And so just because nobody knows how much
you are or you're not going to show.
And, of course, that would also depend on
the depth of each of those projects.
If you're building really gigantic identity systems
and to get through one of those projects
and really help me understand how it works,
it's gonna take like 10 or 15 minutes,
three of those is probably a lot.
-: Thank you.
There's so many great questions,
but I think we only have time for one more.
This one is about best practices
for projects that are maybe under NDA,
or maybe they were paid for by clients,
but not actually used
because they chose a different direction,
which often happens a lot.
So how do you deal with stuff like that,
where it's like you have work
that you wanna show, but it's not necessarily available
to the public yet?
-: Yeah.
Obviously, you should comply with any NDA
that you have,
but it's a really good idea
to do your best to ask that client
if it's okay if you show that work.
Even if there's an NDA,
sometimes they'll say yes, right?
So I think it's a fair question to ask.
That's the NDA aspect.
The other part, if it's work that somebody didn't use
and you know is good and that you're proud of,
just show it, just share it.
And I think that that's just because
it's not something that someone used,
that doesn't mean that
it isn't representative of what you're capable of.
So definitely show it.
-: All right, well, Leon, thank you so much
for that presentation and for all of those tips.
Thank you, everybody, for your chat input
and for your questions.
Sorry we couldn't get to everything,
but I saw that there was a great spreadsheet started
for folks to connect to each other.
You can find Leon online as well.
And I just wanted to thank our members again,
AIGA members, whose contributions
make these free webinars possible to everyone.
And then also a reminder
that you have now three hours
to get in your portfolio review applications
if folks wanna do that next week.
All right, thanks, everyone.
See you at the next one.
-: Thank you, everybody.