Interview: Preparation of Portfolio

As part of the professional practice module we were required to prepare a portfolio of our work for a mock interview with a designer or fellow creative from the industry into which we are hoping to go into once we graduate university. The creative who interviewed me was Jo Davies, an illustrator who works for clients across publishing, editorial, design as well as advertising. So I really looked forward to receiving feedback from a fellow illustrator regarding my illustration based portfolio. 

This year I can finally say that I have developed my own style of illustration and when putting together my portfolio I wanted to present my signature style and show how it transfers across different projects. An important thing for me was to show the variety of work that I have developed; branding, packaging, book illustration, user interface (UI) design and user experience (UX) design. I felt that this was very ambitious to show, and make me stand out as an all-round, consistent designer. The final portfolio which I presented consisted of 5 complete projects.

My preparation process was to present all of my final pieces of work and recap my approach and process of each illustrative project. Due to the circumstances with Covid-19, the interview was held over Microsoft Teams, which took some of the stress away, as I completed the interview from the comfort of my own home studio! 

The key aim of the interview was to give me an expectation of what an interview in the industry would look like and how best to prepare. This gave me an opportunity to put together a collection of my best work, and receive feedback from another illustrator not only about my illustration work, but also about my portfolio layout and what another illustrator would be looking for. One of the biggest improvements suggested my Jo was to show more artwork, rather than final product mockups. This is definitely something that I will improve in my portfolio when I prepare for an interview for a design job.      

Hopefully, when I graduate and proceed to attend interviews in the industry, I will be able to sit with the creatives who I hope to work with face to face, and present my work as a physical portfolio that they can flip through, rather than as a screen share over Microsoft Teams.