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Hey, I’m salmon. I do design and in the video today. I’m doing a portfolio review for my own portfolio. I’ve already made one series of these portfolio reviews and the whole idea. Is that you folks send in your portfolios and me as a new creative in the industry can look at them and give you some friendly advice to try and help you get a job in industry. I stopped making those videos last year, but I’ve had a lot of people asking me to start making them again. And this is series 2 of portfolio reviews to kick things off today. I’m actually going to review my portfolio to put a stake in the ground and say this is what you need to beat. If you want to send your portfolio to me to review now. I know that a lot of students send me portfolios. I know that a lot of recent grads send me portfolios and I’ve been in the industry now for about three years, so it’s slightly different, but I thought that this could be a good way for you to see what it’s like in the future. Also, anything I’m about to show you take it with a pinch of salt. I am just one individual with one opinion in a sea of opinions and anything that I’ve done in this portfolio is not the right way. It’s just a way that I have done it. This is also a continuation of the last portfolio video that I made which was supposed to be a lecture that I was going to give at universities across the country, but obviously with everything going on, that’s not happening, so I turn that lecture into a portfolio video, so go and check that out over here because a lot of those practices and tips that I have are going to be reflected in this portfolio. So if you want to submit your portfolio for some friendly advice. I’m going to give you those details to submit at the end, but first let’s hop into my portfolio. So this is the portfolio that I have been working on since graduation. A portfolio is, as we know a document that never finishes. It’s always ongoing. It’s always changing, it’s always moving. I applied to my current position with a portfolio that was similar to this, but I have since changed this portfolio and it’s had a few more projects put in. And if this isn’t the exact portfolio that got me a job, It’s just an evolution of that. So front page is what I say at the start of every videos. I wasn’t sure whether to put that in because obviously people hiring me at real companies, not Youtube, but real companies don’t necessarily know that I say that at the start of every video, but we know that most portfolios have hello. I am a designer or something like that. The stop. So I decided to put it in so with all of that being said, and that is a lot of been said, let’s hop into the portfolio. So the first page we’ve got here. Second page is a little bit of an overview of about what I believe I do, And this is the same on my website as well. You don’t need to make it completely different documents. You can pull things from one together if you want to have both. So this is on my website as well industrial design, product story and beyond so personally. I’m a designer that does the industrial design side, so that’s manufacturing progressing and stuff like that. So from the iteration stage, the ideation stage the original idea all the way through to sending off to the manufacturers in getting stuff made that is industrial design. I also do some product story stuff as well. So that’s I believe after the products has been made after the product has been designed. I can come in and help with the story that needs to be told to get that product soul, so it’s almost like more on the marketing side as well, but I’m very hands-on, so whether that’s renders or video making or stuff like that, I can do stuff like that and and beyond is like all of the extracurricular stuff that I do as well so Youtube videos, tutorials that procreate stuff that I’ve done for commissions in the past things like that, anything outside of what an industrial designer might be expected to do. That’s all on this kind of content page here, so the first project that we come to is the Bantam frameworks bespoke glasses and again I have a full Youtube series on this project if you haven’t seen that where I designed these glasses and get them made and manufactured by hand in Scotland with BANTAM frameworks. Go and check out that series over here as well and so it’s made its way into my portfolio. We have a very clean layout. I don’t want to have any graphic design, elements and graphic design. You know, block colors and stuff like that. I just want to show the product a very hierarchical hierarchical hierarchy. I just want to show the product and have a good hierarchy, so it’s a very large title, and then we have a subheading and then some text at the bottom, which I will be honest. Nobody is going to read. I don’t even read stuff when when it comes in, so it’s just, they’re kind of almost just to add to the layout. I’ll be honest. I’ve almost thought about, including we call it. Lorem ipsum in InDesign Its texts based on Latin that is just gobbledygook and just is there to act as a placeholder text. I’ve actually thought about submitting portfolios full of lorem Ipsum just to see if anybody notices. I think that’ll be quite interesting experiment to do because I’m not going to read any of that, but we’re gonna go straight into now the process, and it’s all about telling the story of the process, so we’re gonna start with. If we go back a page, we’re gonna start with a hero image. It’s gonna let you know the exact project that it’s going to be about, and then we can dive into the story about how that was made so moving through. It’s obviously going to progress with the fidelity of the sketches, the fidelity of the models. There’s some paper modeling in here, we’re moving food to CAD modeling, and then finally, some renders to show what I think the design will be and then this product is a little bit different because actually what I’m doing is telling people to go and check out the full process on Youtube and not showing the full process in the portfolio itself. I could change that, and I could add more of the process into this portfolio if I wanted to. But what is a good thing? I want you to realize with all of this is. This is as much of the portfolio that I have made in the time that I’ve been given in that. I needed to get this portfolio ready for this specific video. You might need to get a portfolio ready for a specific job. Application, there’s always time constraints, so it’s all about trying to get as much as you can do in that a lot of time so. I’ve just kind of like, said go and look at this online if you want to find out some more information about it and then what I like to do in all of my projects is just end on a nice page of shiny images. That’s going to bring people back and realize that it’s not just about the rough sketches and I can take it all the way through to manufacture and get a really nice and refined image in there as well. So I’ve just put these in a layout and I could break this up into multiple pages or have it all on one page like this, and it’s just something to end the project on a nice note and leave a good taste in people’s mouths about the project, so we’re moving on to the next one now. This is my wait Gantry. Lights that. I never shut up about on Instagram, so I’m sure if you follow me over on Instagram, you’ll know that I have designed this light. And, of course it’s going to go in my portfolio so again, just some fancy images at the very beginning of the project just to set the tone of the project and to let people know exactly what it is that the project is about, but I see a lot of the time is people opening the project, the first page with some really rough and awful sketches and like if you were flicking through a magazine or if you were looking at some books on a shelf, you wouldn’t show the the gritty like eye. We all know that design is gritty and ugly and rough when it first starts but to bring people into the project and to bring them along on this journey. You don’t want to start with that? You want to start with something? That’s really gonna excite them and then go into the horrible, ugly sketches and stuff like that like this. So the way that we read things in english-speaking languages is from left to right top to bottom. So what I want is all of the really rough sketches in the top left and all of the refined things at the end of the page at the right hand side, and that’s exactly the way that I’ve got it laid out here and then moving things on to more refined modeling and refined ideation. This is a heavily iteration in process, so I was going back and forth between sketching and modeling and sketching and modeling, and for sure I’ve separated them out onto pages like this, but that’s just my way of showing that, but it’s just to show that I didn’t finish on one sketch, and then that’s the finished thing. It’s all to do with iterations and stuff like that as well, so it’s good to have this iterations in there as well and then some fancy shots, but looking more at the technical side of things. I wanted to show that this thing was designed and engineered to be 3d printed with no support material. That’s one of gantrie’s requirements is that all of their lights cannot have any 3d support material at all, so you’re still dealing with manufacturing constraints, even though it’s a 3d printed light, so I wanted to show this cross-section view of something that looks pretty technical without putting in some ugly SolidWorks screen captures. I wanted to just amplify that and show me holding it. I don’t know if that’s necessarily the right way of doing it. I’m sure people would understand and employers, and if you’re leaning more on the engineering side, they would understand if you just had a SolidWorks screen shot in there or an engineering manufacturing screen shot. But I wanted to just make it a little bit more lifestyle ii-in in the way that it’s shot. So that’s why I have that the series the lineup comes in different colors and again that layout I am trying to go for is so simple. The white space is my friend in situations like this, just a little bit of text at the bottom and again nobody’s going to read, but it’s there just that help with the layout more than anything and then we’re going to move into the final stage, which is just finishing off the project in some nice editorial images. The way that I’ve done, This is slightly different because actually what I’ve done is. I’ve shown the editorial images at the end, but by showing a different skill and that is that these are not photographs. These are renders so instead of rounding off this project with some photographs of the light in a nice room, What I’ve actually done is shown it with renders in a nice room. Just show that I can render stuff as well and then something a little bit more abstract. This was more of a stylized photoshoot thing for, but but rendered still rendered, so it’s more of a studio shot, not in an environment itself. I’m talking so fast by the way I don’t normally talk this fast, but there’s a lot of portfolio to get through. I want to show you as much as I can and help you learn as much as you can as well, so I’m going through this as fast as I can explaining every page. Obviously, if you’ve seen any of my previous portfolio videos, you’ll know that when someone first opens a portfolio, they skim through it as fast as they can. They don’t even stop to read anything they barely stop to look at stuff, So the fact that I’m going through this page by page and explaining each page that’s never going to happen. You need to grab people’s attention so fast, which is why these big images are helpful. It’s why having the title in the same place and the copy, the body text in the same place, it’s always really helpful just to make sure that people can flick through it as fast as they can and still get all of that information that they can. So this project is. It was a university project. Going back a page? It was a university project that we did it. In teams of five and it was split into two terms of the project. The first term was all about Market Analysis, future proofing a brand choosing a brand and deciding where that market will be going in the future, like the next five or ten years, or or, however, long it was and then rebranding that company to fit within that space. This project alone is what has set me up to do so well in design consultancy because that is exactly the type of job that that is its understanding the market moving forward understanding how a brand can meet that market and kind of beat it to where it’s going and then design for that future that nobody really knows what’s going on. So that is pretty much. What design consultancy does, but what? I’ve done for these products in showing you in. My portfolio is vision, the only page that shows about two months of design research and and and future casting and rebranding, That’s because the the roles that I have been applying to have been purely industrial design roles, and if I was ever going to start applying to research roles consultancy roles to talk about markets and to talk about the research side of things, absolutely, I would need to change the way that I’ve written this project in this portfolio to show more of the research and strategy side and less of the actual industrial design side so granted. I only have this one page of a lot of work that went into this, but as long as you know that we repositioned the bookstore. Waterstone’s to meet a market where we thought people were going to become more nomadic people. We’re going to be freelancing. More people going to be moving around the country, more moving around the world more and really wanting to connect back to their friends and families wherever they moved on to as well. We realized that. Waterstone’s could become the company to let you tell your own story. That’s the whole rebrand that everybody is an author. Everybody wants to tell their own story, and it’s not about leaving a legacy after you die. Necessarily, the research got deep is not about leaving the legacy. After you die. It’s about leaving daily legacies. We had everyday legacies that people could tell their stories anyway. It was a big research project and that led on to designing products that needed to fit that repositioned Waterstone’s, branding to be able to let Waterstone’s do the things that it needed to do. In five to ten years, so the research and the branding we all did as a team of five, but then the product, the individual product we did individually, but that product still had to fit within the range of products that our team was was designing if that makes sense so. I had personally chosen to do a public telephone that let you call your parents your friends, your family. And it was a public phone that used noise-canceling technology to surround you in a bubble of silence. It’s basically a noise cancelling headphone, but on a loudspeakers scale, that’s essentially what the project was. I wanted to invoke this sense of a candlestick phone. Which is what you can see in the in the top left there, the old analog Candlestick phones because our whole branding solution for Waterstone’s was it would be analog technology shown through a vibrant aesthetic that mirrored the look of books on a shelf, so we wanted this wooden backdrop and pop color to show books and books on a bookshelf Anyway, again, ideation and moving forward to sort of think, you know, how can this look to invoke a sense of a candlestick phone whilst looking contemporary and modern at the same time? So that’s obviously the ideation there. Quick-and-dirty process of saying? I’m not afraid to be in the workshop. I’m not afraid to go and get some foam block and just start carving stuff out. It was a great process to hone those skills in as well. So how does the project work? This is sort of taking a step back from from the process and almost becoming like a brochure for how the how the product actually works. So you know, you walk into the water stones. You connect your phone and blah, blah, blah, You unhook the receiver. That means that silence falls all around you because it’s then opening up the microphones. Yeah, then you have your phone call. You enjoy it. You put the receiver back into the holster and then walk away in your phone automatically disconnects. Yeah, that is pretty much. The project mine turned out pretty well. I think I think everybody else is in. The projects did as well. It was an amazing project. Basically, that it’s the one thing at university that set me up to be a design consultant anyway, moving on now away from my personal projects to becoming a a design intern at Paul Cox, a studio which is where I spent eight months or so in my design internship and we worked on crazy crazy designs for galleries and I guess rich people to buy These were not mass-produced designs whatsoever, but it was a really great experience to be able to design high art high design items if that makes sense that we’re planning to go on galleries and public exhibitions and public designs for public spaces. It was a great experience, so I’ve put that in my portfolio as well and then coming to my time at Precipice Design as a 3d designer president going through a rebrand and now they are called recipe. And I think I’m gonna have to change. I don’t know if I should change this to say. I worked at recipe design because it’s the same company. Just a different name anyway. I don’t know, I’m probably gonna have to talk to them about it and ask, but talking about what I did at a company while I was part of a big team. That always comes up in. How can you show that? How can you do that and it’s very tricky to do. I get that because you know you might have done one little thing, but then you can’t show the whole thing. It gets really tricky to show, and I get that so the way that I’ve gone around. It is to show what press space has done as a whole as long as it’s in the public domain by the way. Any work that you do at a company that is under. NDA Non-disclosure agreement means that it’s confidential and you cannot share anyone even someone in the same field, especially someone in the same field. So if you’re going to another company and applying for a job and you turn up with your portfolio, a full of confidential stuff, that’s bad, that’s really bad, so I’m only showing stuff That is publicly available. It’s on the precipice website. It’s on the recipe website now, and I’m not taking credit for anything in specific detail here. I’m just showing this is what we worked on, but it’s good to show a project that we did as a whole so moving back and forth between these pages. You can see that he worked on the Brawn audio well. The brown audio depends on how you want to pronounce it The brown audio packaging and all the marketing and launch assets that are needed to relaunch the company to come back into the audio industry. After 53 years away from that sector or, however, long it was so we were in charge of the branding and all of the photo assets. The rendering. I did a lot of work on rendering stuff, rendering interiors and this is the project that really kicked that off for me and why I then started. My Sam. Does interiors page over Instagram? So go and check that out If you want to see more of my interior. Enders, but this is the project that started that off for me, and while I was at precipice, I also did some more rendering some visualization for Red Hill Farm Estate, some editorial renders and stuff like that, as well as a point of sale marketing stuff, procreate commissioned artwork, so I was approached by procreate to test out their new. I think he was 4.2 Yeah, version, 4.2 and now procreate is on version 5 so this is quite a while ago now, but it was just as they bought in the ellipse tool, the quick shape ellipse, so they wanted me to test that out and they they paid me Commission to do that and then ending on some interior scene renders like I said moving through. These are just the the key shot ranges that I did and thank you for watching. What a long time! It took me to go through that portfolio now this portfolio. I always get questions. How long should a portfolio B? How many projects should you put in? You know, stuff like that. And this portfolio was very long granted. I wouldn’t send all of these projects to a company if they were asking for a specific type of designer, you know if they were asking for an industrial designer that does manufacturing stuff. I choose the manufacturing stuff like they were asking for an industrial designer with a strong knowledge of his own research in market analysis. And things like that. I’d obviously pick some different ones, so what I’ve got with? This master document is a wave. I can pick and choose the exact projects that I need to show people to show them. I can already do the work that they need their help with. I think we’re back. I think my camera ran out of. I was recording for more than 30 minutes, and my camera stopped recording, so I don’t know how much of that could have, but let’s see in the Edit. I hope that was interesting to see my live portfolio. This is a this is literally the portfolio that I am working on. I was finishing this off just before even making this video. So this is my live current open portfolio that obviously is going to change and evolve as new projects. Come in, I’ve actually got a few new projects that I would love to put in, but I can’t show you yet because they are under NDA or they’re about to be made, but not haven’t been made yet, so I want to wait to to put them in before I can start shouting about it. I hope that was helpful for you. To see what can be achieved in a portfolio to show the process in a nice visual way and to take out all of the clutter. So now, if you want to submit your portfolio for review, I ask for one thing only, and that is you have seen all of my portfolio reviews from season one and implemented those changes into your portfolio Just because I have given some advice to someone else when I was reviewing their portfolio. That means that you can also take on that advice and apply it to yours as well, so go back through watch as many of my portfolio reviews as you can from Season 1 make sure that you’ve applied that to your portfolio and then send it to me for review, so you’ve seen the style of portfolio that I have, and I obviously have a lot that I can improve mine with as well. Some of the criticisms that I got from my recent job application was it’s all quite fluffy. There’s not a lot of content in it in terms of like design, Its all very top level. Not a lot of engineering has gone into it, like not a lot of engineering knowledge, and it’s gone into it. Not a lot of technical skill has gone into it in terms of showing that it’s almost like here’s a sketch. Here’s a cad model of it and here’s the finish render, and that is advice that I need to take on board and sort of go really into the depths with it as well. What I might do actually is send a company a top-level portfolio to get into the door to get an interview and then when I turn up for that interview, I come with just a really heavy document of everything that went into it, and this is obviously just that top-level document. I would still need to make that really in-depth heavy document to go through all of the details to really make sure that the employers know that. I can do the things that they need help with anyway to submit your portfolio. Send a PDF no larger than five megabytes. If you need to know how to make your portfolio a lo megabyte size but have a high quality image. I reckon you watch this video that I made on doing exactly that. It’s helped me to go back and watch that a few times as well, so I recommend going to watch that. So A PDF. Five megabytes send that along with the title portfolio review, two portfolios at Sam Does Dot design so anything that comes to you that email, I will know that it’s all about portfolio reviews. So if you want to get some friendly advice in the next video, then send your portfolio over. I’ll be picking some portfolios at random. I get more portfolio sent that I can review, so I’m just gonna say that at the top now. I’m gonna pick them at random, but don’t forget if I don’t review your portfolio. Specifically, you can use the advice that I give to other people, so all of that is to say. I hope you enjoyed this video and learned something about what I’m personally looking for in a portfolio. I hope that it might have been a little bit. I opening for you to see my portfolio and my live portfolio. Don’t forget that this isn’t The definitive answer to what a portfolio should be. I know that I need to change a lot in it as well, but yeah. I hope that you found it even a little bit testing. If you did let me know down in the comments because I love hearing about what you found interesting what I can improve on. I love seeing those things. Don’t forget to comment like, and subscribe and hit the bell button and everything else that Youtube asks you to do. And I will see you guys in the next video bye.