This course provides students the opportunity to create working web and print portfolios of curated, "best of" work to present to future employers.

Before you get started, you should spend time thinking about how you will best convey your work and your brand, so you stand out above others vying for the same position.

<aside> 💵 The following videos are chock-full of valuable information that will help you refine your presentation. I recommend that you watch them with pencil in hand, and make notes. If you don't, many of the ideas will dissipate before you have the opportunity to implement them.

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The BIG PICTURE—What to Include in a Portfolio

This LinkedIn presentation clocks in at 52 minutes and is completely worth your time. You should be able to access this LinkedIn video FREE by using your uwa.edu email and credentials. If, not, let me know in the GroupMe.

LinkedIn Learning | Login

Critiques—How Your Work is Seen

https://youtu.be/VFAkgNpAVSo

https://youtu.be/gQX8mVLm6D8

Let me guess what you're thinking:

I don't have any work worth showing. The field is new to me, so I don't have any professional samples. And I'm not far enough along in the program to have enough work to show. How do you expect me to build a portfolio when I don't have any work?

• Do you have pencil and paper?
• Do you have access to Adobe Creative Cloud and hundreds of other design softwares, many of which are free?
• Do you know people who have wicked problems that can be best solved by you with a design solution?

Maybe your problem is not a lack of work samples but a lack of motivation.

Forgive me for being blunt:

You are in school to get a "good" job. You are going up against other people who live and breathe this stuff. Maybe it's time to step up your game.

Make stuff that will help you in your chosen area of interest.

Start a podcast.

Take over a company's social media.

Design an event poster.

Make a training video.

Design a party invitation.

Make your best friend an eBay store logo.

Design a t-shirt for your church.

Do something, anything, that builds skills and moves you along. When should you start? Yesterday. And every day from now on. Do you think the people you are competing with are waiting around for their next class assignment? That's just not how creative disciplines work.

And when you do something, write up a case study that explains how your work provides a solution to a specific problem. Storytelling is the key to getting a "good" job because employers are less interested in seeing pretty things on a sheet of paper than they are in how you think. And that, my friends, is the key to how you should construct your portfolio. Show how you think, how you solve problems with design. And then do it again and again.

You can get a job even if they hate the project—if you can explain how you got there.