Portfolio Advice From Square.One

Earlier in the week I e-mailed Jonathan from Square.One with my current portfolio and asked if he and the head designer would take a look and give me some feedback - he replied earlier say that there was far too much text and that they'd suggest using double-page spreads to allow room for bigger images. They were complimentary of my work itself though, which is re-assuring. Jonathan also agreed to be a referee on my CV.

Deadlines During Collaborative Work

Work on the briefs I'm doing collaboratively has been pretty slow lately, the only progress we've made in nearly three weeks was establishing what needs to be changed via test printing. Two weeks ago I booked some digital print slots, and I told Joe about them 4-5 days ago, earlier today he sent me rough copies of two more illustrations, so the talk of deadlines had probably given him motivation for the briefs that wasn't there before we set deadlines.

During my collaborative brief with Freya I've had to work according to deadlines Freya's set me, and I noticed that I concentrated on that brief specifically just after she set the deadlines and just before the deadlines themselves. This has highlighted the importance of discussing deadline with the people your working with.

The Modern Game

In a recent crit where I spoke about the work Joe and I were doing on the European Championships and Football Programme Covers, someone suggested I look at trying to get our work shown on The Modern Game, a football-based design blog. This is something I spoke to Joe about this earlier and we're both really excited about trying, it's given a morale boost to projects that've been moving pretty slowly.

End Of Year Presentation

Below is a copy of the Presentation I gave earlier:



This is roughly what I said:

Live Brief - Freya Williams Self-Promotion

I met with Freya this morning to discuss the final stages of the brief as described here. Throughout this brief I've managed to get her to change her mind on most things we disagreed on, this morning however I couldn't get her to change her mind about the border on the flaps in the folder, a feature which I really don't like. This has lead to us agreeing that she'll print one with a plain border for me to use in my submission folder for extended practice.

Being More Organised

Today I realised that the deadline for Clockwork Orange book cover competition is tomorrow afternoon and whilst the design itself is finished I'm still nowhere near preparing the entry itself. Whilst I have been working on briefs that are more important for a portfolio recently, missing this deadline is a massive oversight and I wanted to make sure it doesn't happen again in either of my YCN or Starpack briefs, or for the extended practice deadline in general.

I then made a spreadsheet of everything that needs to be done on every brief for the extended practice deadline - colour coding each cell to what stage I was at. This showed exactly how much work needs to be done before the end of the year.

From tomorrow I'll be working on the submissions for briefs 3 and 10 for their competitions so I don't miss the submission dates for them as I did with brief 4. I trialled how this system would work using the brief 1 and found the design boards looked like this.



I feel like these are of a high enough quality to submit and take onboard Lee Goater's advice that there should be minimal text as all the text that is there explains something that isn't obviously clear from the images.

Lee Goater Talk

Lee spoke about his experience within the industry so far, some of the key points I took from his talk were:

• If you're self-employed say yes to as much work as possible - you'll naturally learn to prioritise whilst doing this.
• Work in London tends to be very corporate and specialised - work in the north tends to be more varied.
• Big clients try to take advantage of you because they know everyone wants work for them in their portfolios.
• When working freelance business cards tend not to be used, things that have everyday applications such as fridge magnets work better.
• Try to get your clients to be as honest as possible to find out what it is they really want from the project.
• Don't do pitches for free as every hour you work is important and valuable.
• When working out an estimate account for twice the time you'll think you need.
• Make sure you're getting something out of every brief you do.
• Social media is important for getting work.
• Try to keep your portfolio as free from text as possible - the work should speak for itself.
• Know your audience to make sure you don't waste time chasing clients that aren't right for you.
• 80% of work is repeat business so it's important to have a good relationship with clients.
• He doesn't "really have a website" - he doesn't think it's necessary.
• Make an effort to physically see clients so they know you're interested in what they're doing.
• Don't show someone all your work at one time, hold some work back to show them when you next talk to them.

I spoke to Lee after about how he'd suggest I present my work in a portfolio and how I'd send samples of them to potential employers. We spoke with particular reference to the Fish Travel Packaging, Harri Larkins Logo, the Football Programme Covers, and the Euro 2016 Posters. In general the advice was about being more ambitious with the thoroughness of the finishing of each project - something I've struggled with in the past. He suggested I look at this project for Hyde Park Picture House by Alphabet as an example of this.

I found his advice really useful as it made me re-think my approach to extended practice after Easter. Perhaps rather then take on new briefs I should be focussing on my presentation of my current ones.

Sending Business Cards to Bristol

Having mentioned to Freya that I was going to print some business cards to send to Harri Larkin in Bristol, she offered to print me off some when she was printing the work I did for her. Today I cut them up. It will be interesting to see if these generate any responses, specifically ones that could lead to projects that will require more work in the future as with Harri Larkin.

Live Brief - Freya Williams Self-Promotion

I met with Freya today to discuss what needed to be done next. Unfortunately she didn't have time to get everything printed, but did enough to know that when she'd shown the business cards and postcards to some of her coursemates and tutors the feedback was positive, so she asked that I not change anything too drastically about the folder when she sends me her latest batch of work, which should be in the next few days.

Elmwood Talk

Elmwood talked to us about how they approach their projects and about how working for a large agency presents problems like having to take on a lot of corporate clients to pay the bills and often being asked to fulfil large tasks that they have no experience with.

They said they approach their briefs in little chunks, they find some inspiration, then figure out how it's going to work and then break the designing of it down into smaller and more manageable tasks.

They also suggested that the pace they have to work at tends not to be a problem for them because by throwing yourself into an environment where you're forced to work quickly you'll automatically learn to think quicker and prioritise better.