After receiving advice on my PDF portfolio from Alan in December, as well as others, I redid the whole thing and have ended up with, in my opinion, a much better result. I emailed it to Alan again recently and his feedback is once again really helpful and to the point. Below I have included parts of his email response and my opinions of them.
That looks much cleaner and much stronger than your earlier portfolio.
Seeing it like this, I see a few more changes that could be made.
The logo on each page seems a bit over the top now, and I’d stick with it on the cover only.
This is an interesting point, however it contradicts other advice I have been given and so I will have a look and get advice from my peers to see what works better aesthetically as in my opinion the logo on each page enhances the portfolio.
Some of the type still jumps around a little bit as i flick through the images.
I have looked at the pdf and on one page the type at the bottom is in a different place which can be easily fixed.
The black key line around the images lowers the overall aesthetic of the portfolio.
I placed a thin line around the images with a white background upon the advice of Gary from a portfolio feedback session in December, but i shall see if editing the line to make it even thinner, or removing it completely would be more appropriate.
You’ve got some really strong work, but it feels a bit inconsistent at times.
Personally, I think your stronger stuff is the hand-drawn elements, (the wavy hair is particularly charming).
This has always been a problem for me as it took a long time to get my working method to a more finalised state, so the work from earlier projects looks a lot different to my work now. I have tried to remove the less appealing work from the portfolio and make it more consistent, and I've tried to organise the portfolio into similar methods and palettes. I think the only thing I can do for this issue is keep making work and updating my portfolio until it inevitably ends up the way it should.
The left white stripes poster is a lot stronger than the other two, but it gets a bit over powered when next to them.
Some full page landscape spreads might work really well in there.
When editing the portfolio I did think that I should perhaps spread the images out, however I was worried it would end up being too big. I do agree that The White Stripes main image should have it's own page, and value this kind of advice as it is just the small details that make a massive difference.
I know this can’t be done now, but in future I think you could benefit from spending time working on personal work, and getting rid of some of the pieces you don’t feel belong with the portfolio.
Make it into a more solid body of work. Just getting your style down to what you want to do.
This is a really good point, made quite regularly by a variety of people, as I think my method is often lead by briefs, and so spending time working on the kind of topics that I want to work with will lead to, as Alan says, a solid body of work.
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