Your Design Work Doesn’t Need A Selfie
One of my jobs as creative director at Visually is browsing the portfolios of prospective creative talent (those who apply to be part of the Visually Marketplace) to make sure they are up to our company’s standards. This involves looking at thousands of portfolios. While I certainly appreciate sites like Behance and Dribbble, who have standardized the portfolio experience, I feel that there are certain designer-led trends that are making the experience rather intolerable.
Before I get into my peeves, let me show you what I am looking for. Your design work, un-adulterated. Ideally your work in totality. This means the whole thing, at full resolution but if not then a zoomed-out view and a close up of your work if a full res is not available. Details matter.
Here is what I don’t need.
You holding it!
I appreciate the attempt to show your work, “in context”, but this should really ONLY be done if you are doing something that is designed to be printed, like brochures, posters, or business cards. “In context” for everything else digital is just that… pixels on the screen. If you are showing off more than your work, you are doing your work a disservice.
Also, I know that’s not you in that photo. Printing something oversize is not easy, which is why many designers just photoshop it. You get no points for laziness.
This also goes for work that is clipped or otherwise hung up on a wire, as if it was just off the printing press. Yes I know this has been photoshopped too and yes it makes it look more generic than your work should be.
This work looks really cool on it own. But wait, judging from the size of those clips, this might only be 7 inches across, making the entire thing illegible if printed as depicted. What kind of designer would print something that can’t be read? None that I want to work with. Like the creepster photobombing your selfie, displaying your work like this may give off bad information that doesn’t put you in the best light. And those fold marks… aRRG. Why would crease something so wonderfully refine? Oh right… photoshop again.
And there is one more realism trend that has turned to the dark side. The “if I show it on an angle, it will look like a real thing” trend. If all I can see of your work is this, I am just moving on.
Not only does it totally obscure the details (and other important aspects) of your work, but the repetitive templating just feels lazy. Trust me, displaying your design work as a hoverboard above an featureless plane is not making it look any more real. Even if your photoshop skills are quite excellent, can you can fool 95% of the on lookers with the fake angles and DOF, its hard to tell what you are looking to show off? For the untrained eye it looks as if your photography skills are on display, not your design skills.
So my advice to designers looking to impress more than the neophytic onlooker is to keep it simple. Do not call forth into a photoshop existence something that was never meant to exist. If you are designing stationary, then obviously I want to see how it looks on actual stationary, but if you are designing something that will be displayed only on screens then an on-angle selfie will only make me question your design judgement.
