A few weeks back I got wind of the annual Art & Design Career Expo. I have been interested in getting a summer job or internship in the local area for a while now but haven’t had much luck finding a place to apply or actually securing a internship for the summer which is why I was particularly interested in this expo.

As far as having a portfolio to show in person I didn’t exactly have anything of significance, which is a problem when that’s what everyone wants to see if you can imagine. I had a few drawings from studio classes, a poster or two from random projects, and this-and-that lying around. But what I did have was a week; one week to get my work together and get it in some sort of presentable fashion. Luckily time was on my side, barely, though it’s not like I was in some life or death rush, I just wanted to be prepared as well as I could be.

My first order of business was to get my printed portfolio together. But even before that I had to do a little research on the companies I wanted to interview with to see what they really did so I could fine tune what I brought to the table on expo day. Luckily all the companies I wanted to interview with, more or less, were looking for the same type of people, so I could create one encompassing portfolio instead of fine-tuning a few different ones. I printed off a number of my illustrations off on my small(ish) photo printer, removed the excess white space with my trusty xacto, and slid them into the pages of my slightly-larger-than-notebook sized zipper portfolio.

Next, I needed some resumes to pass out. I’ve read a few places that potential employers respond well to resumes printed out on heavy paper, so I pulled out my thick matte stock and ran off ten or so copies and slid them into the front of my portfolio. Also, there was a clear little pocket in the front of the inside of the portfolio, I’m guessing for business cards, so I threw a short stack of my cards in there for good measure.

The Monday before the career expo, I had sat in on a talk given by a professor and our career development coordinator at our weekly student AIGA group on how to best show your work and talents, what to include in your portfolio, and what to avoid. The subject of leave-behinds and the impact they can have came up a time or two and I thought it was a good idea for myself.

I’ve had this nifty little jewelboxing system by Coudal for a few years now but never really found the right opportunity to use them so I thought now would be a great time to do so. They came with all the necessary inserts and labels that you just run though your printer after designing using their templates; one very slick and professional product. Anyhow, the components of my leave-behind were simple; an illustration on the front that I had just completed, inside the booklet had a short blurb of text to inject some of my personality into the project, the CD label was dark grey with my logo in white, and the back of the jewel box had my logo in white on manilla. I wrapped each booklet in vellum and outlined, on the vellum, the top half of my illustration with a fine point sharpie and drew in some detail using a super fine 0.20 mm pen. On the back of the vellum-wrapped booklet I notched to tabs which held one of my business cards.

For the CD I created a simple website that held images of all of my portfolio items. It was just a super basic CSS+XHTML website, super-light on text, and heavy on images of my work. The website was laid out into two sections, one for select portfolio-level work, and the second section at the bottom was stuff that I liked creating or working on. The goal of the second section was to be like “Hey, you’ve seen my work, but now check out a few things that tell you what I’m really about.” Just another way of putting myself into my leave-behind and perhaps appealing to the same interests as whomever looks at my portfolio.

So all in all I worked hard for a good week to get my act together. I got great response to my leave-behind and in the end I had a few great interviews, so we’ll see what comes of them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 7:57 PM and is filed under Creativity, Design, Personal.