fonts will be consistent in the final

btw, every [design] professor i've had has called arial a 'bastard font' (since it's microsoft's homemade version of helvetica, so they wouldn't have to buy the license)

exactly!!!!

And pages 11 and 12 are the great swine project. Is just the different font gets a little funky. And I like Arial better, I hink it is cleaner, but is personal preference. I did my portoflio in Futura at the urging of my wife, it's basically a phatter arial.

I still love the name of the project and the possibilities it insinuates.
It is very epic, the great swine, babylon, the highway system eating up our resources at great speeds. Although not architectural it is my favorite.

didnt know that, thats funny

how about
this?

Is that really 87 pages? I didn't wait for it to finish loading, but I have a sneaky suspicion that it's way too long.

I like the look of the cover/backing, though.

e4nim... i think it is too long... but i did enjoy looking through it... Some of it has great potential and perhaps you should focus on these... often i found myself
interested in one spread/project and not so consumed in the next...

every one else great work too... +q... should i indeed continue the trend and agree that your portfolio is quite nice? well i just did...

some nice alternative fonts are Avenir, Univers, Rotis...and there are many more that are a lot nicer then arial...or, they have more 'character' you could say....imho.

off to sculpt a banana pudding monkey head...casting vanilla wafers in the morning.

Rotis is one of my favorites--so diverse

e4nim
that is a serious portfolio. must be expensive to print. nice work, but you should trim out all of the non-eye-candy

in case anyone missed the redraft when we went to the next page link--i need as much feedback as i can get...

Thanks for your comments. I tried to explain my idea from A to Z. That probably makes my portfolio quite heavy... Plus,because I was so embarrassed with lots of works to do for applying and deficient time, I failed to trim out. Anyway, more serious critic please.

I am pretty sure e4nim that you placed all of those pages for the purpose of showcasing all of your abilities to everyone in this forum and do not seriously consider sending that in its entirety to an employer? LOL All in all your work is excellent. For the purposes of employment, focus on actual projects and keep your conceptual works for your private collection. Hand drawings...awesome....and they are great for beginning each section! Great use of all of your talents...you hit them with your great hand skills and then bang! the project's evolution...nice. Ew, and I also like the way you thought out most of your page layouts and backgrounds...extremely creative. However, the Starbucks emblems.....too much...that's not even originally yours...so why bring so much attention to it? Oh and sometimes...too wordy....you know where. Nice work.

nie work +q.

give u some advice..put in some work done PURELY by hand..a few sketches /perspectives etc.

It will show your overall mastery.

I don't quite get a full understanding of the space within your community library by the way you've displayed it...hence, the ambiguity...and perhaps that is your intent. However, how do you prove your understanding of space. It's a cool design no doubt...but it truly doesn't feel well developed in terms of an actual project. Do u have any hand drawings besides the price hill projectand I guess the ford foundation? These don't represent your creative ability if they're just copies of existing buildings. I'd think u'd want to emphasize original work and process. Dig in your personal arsenal and showcase "your" work. I don't know how long you have but work on some creative works to include...a couple of drawings. I also think you overused your renderings for the community library...there's no variety in terms of representation or thought process....obviously generated from one program. Oh, and emphasize your process pages more for the descale rescale project...the 4 thumbnails...very boring layout...apparently the process is extremely interesting...make it known that u see it that way as well. Overall, interesting work.

sorry...last post was for 5....good luck.

Thanks a lot rebelliousz_poet and nevermore.

My hat is off to you e4nim. That is a beautiful portfolio, how long have you been working on it. i wont buy that shit that you just put it together at the last second ;) That is a well crafted piece of media.

I am not sure what you applied for, but I agree with everyone here that it is too long. Mainly becauase I adont udnerstand your orgnization. it seems like you have some GREAT projects with some ok graphic design and art work sprinkled throughout. Your last few projects are nothing short of beautiful, some of the first projects and pieces of art work that I personally did not find inspiring.

I would keep:
pages 56-83 are by far the strongest. I also like pages 22 trhough 33.
That will cut your portoflio in half and only show your strongest projects.

As far as font your pages are too pixelated to see what is going, and cat read some text (at least in my computer you can't).

Explain what the portoflio is for, and maybe we can help you more.

best o' luck

+q.

Thanks again for your cheering comments!
My portfolio is for applying for M.arch program as you know..

Thuh, modified starbuck's logos are intended to show something similar to the works of Andy Warhol in the relation with semiotics. Although those logos are not my original works, I used them to clarify my own concept of that project. And to your comment that some pages are too wordy, I absolutely agree with you. However, as you mentioned, I think that's just one of many ways to show jury how I was absorbed with my project. I did not have any intention or hope that jury really read them all. Thanks to your praise~.

+q, I have been working on it for about two and half months and is for M.arch. When I first started this portfolio, I hope this to be my personal history book. Thus, I enlisted some of my favorite works including professional works on my firm. Although it is certain that there are some page restrictions in each graduate school, I ignored such restrictions because I dont have enough time to trim out. Thanks to your kind comments too.

Hope you guys have good luck either. :)

e4nim - given the nature of your work, i can't imagine 87 pages is going to work against you. your portfolio is beautiful and your charcoal drawings are stunning. respectfully, i wasn't all that impressed with the other portfolios. the work in them was great, but they all feels so contrived, so "architecty". your portfolio is unique. it strongly reflects you and some well-thought-out (and strong) positions on design.

i look forward to seeing your buildings one day!

good luck to everyone!

You do not need to shorten your portfolio.
It shows a wide variety of work and most of it is badass.

Why do "schools" restrict portfolios to a certain number anyway?

Oh yeah e4nim, how did you get to draw so well?!

first, why is schools, "schools"? are you implying they are something other than their definition?

and schools restrict length so they don't have to sift through 120 pages of crappy images because a student can't edit. e4nim, if you don't have time to trim out, why should the portfolio review people bother doing it for you?

i know some schools have dimension limitations, including thickness, but the only one i know with a page limit is UPenn, what are some others?

berkeley had a pg. limit.

Arizona State has a page limit as well.

while i love e4's portfolio, i would have to agree with the above comments. as soon as they get your tome in their hands and get a sense of it's weight, they are likely not spend to much time on any of the work. think about it, if they get 300 portfolios and they spend any time on your vast book what time would they have to look through others? they might also think here is someone shooting a shotgun and hoping something lands on the target, instead of taking aim with their best work and most representative of who you are now. the other things to think about are these; your work seems to leave little room for growth, in that i mean, many schools i think look for driven talent that may be a little less polished than you present, which would indicate a potential for further growth in their curriculum/school, and lastly, the emphasis you might want to focus on and seem to do in a lot of the work is to develope, in depth, some of the projects and in doing that your portfolio will be more appropriate for the MARCHs.

my professor said to me that the ivies look for about 1/2" thk portfolios of well developed projects and less fluff. so far that thought seems pretty correct.

S brings up something that I always found a little funny.

And I want to ask what people think:

Is it bad to be architecty in your portfolio?

That has been brought up on the past. I think Kai said the same thing and that is why he fashioned his portoflio to show as little architecture as possible.

My thoughts: I am going for an MArch, and I want to show that I have the tools to design architecture in all its forms. And although it involves many media, I always feel that the end result needs to be architecture, space, etc.... I eman speically for someone like me with a 4 yr. non prof design degree. if I was a BFA, I would show what I know how to do, etc....

S, I hope this doesn't turn into an identity crisis for us.

+q,
i can certainly see where that argument comes from. take college admissions, for example. a 1600 sat, summa cum laude and national merit no longer will get you into the top colleges. however, take a 1250 sat, 2.9 gpa with a massive bird watching habit and you'll put that person at harvard without a problem. this happened to a good portion of my friends after high school. academic badasses who didn't get into the top academies.
now, academic merit stops becoming a measure for value to an academic institution as information availability increases. similarly, i could imagine that there are plenty of architects trying to get into m archs, but the students who might be most able to come up with new ways of thinking about architecture are those with backgrounds in figurative sculpture, music, theoretical physics, computer science, etc. for example (grain of salt please, because i only applied to one school due to geographic limitations, and it was cincinnati), my admission portfolio only included a sketched portrait of myself on the cover and a series of papers i had written in college on presocratic philosophies. i got a full ride. so that's a pretty non-architecty portfolio, and it worked for me. (btw, +q, not knowing anything about it, i used arial ;.) )

I was told once, by an impressive, successful woman who I admire and respect very much...

(paraphrasing)
"No one cares about credentials, it's about performance"

You could be summa cum laude whatever....but in the real world you could be completely incompetent. Think about it.

e4nim, your bandwidth run out or something? anybody care to link to it from another site? all the talk, I want to see it.

hello everyone....let me explain my position better and please know my comments are with the best of intentions....

from what i have seen, you all have fabulous portfolios with work that expresses a lot of talent. what set e4nim's portfolio apart, for me, was that it wasn't predictable. it unfolded, quite exquisitely. it sped up, it slowed down, it sped up again. it expressed those subtleties that too often get overlooked.

i also agree that he/she may not need an m.arch-having a background in engineering and the ability to execute a portfolio of that caliber, well...you're going to be VERY successful one day.

i still strongly believe that your portfolio of 87 pages is fine. admissions committees don't want to look at 87 pages of repetitive mediocrity. this is not your problem. if you're willing to take a stand for all the right reasons and risk upsetting a handful of people, more power to you.

in all fairness +q, you're right. you are showing your strengths from your educational background, the same way a philosophy major is going to show their writing/critical thinking abilities. i'm sure if i read a lot of philosophy papers, after a while, i would find some common threads among them. just be sure not to limit yourself to doing things in only one particular way because that's what you were taught, that's what you know, that's what you know will get you an "A", ya da ya da ya da. making tons of mistakes, taking risks and exploring is what makes it all fun!

again, good luck to everyone!!

S,
I agree with you, but I don't think most people do the design they do just to get the A. At the very least I am sure I do not, althoguh I always did, I could care less about grades.

And I have to say that the portoflios I am seeing here do not look cookie-cutter to me, they looked like the work of people that care about their craft be it photography to, yes, "architectural design" *gasp*.

All I am saying is that I have a background on architecture and I can show my skills only on that medium. I went outside my medium to create a process, using anything from painting to t-shirts to develop my spatial/programmatic ideas. And so did most other people as I am seeing.

Why are architects scared to take their own medium seriously?

Although, to be fair, the study of arhcitecture as an end in itself a relatively recent thing, ususally architects where artists, or philosophers, etc.... that tinkered with the built form. Maybe we miss those days.

Once again I feel that it is too easy for some architectural designers out there to follow that line of thinking. Architectural design is pase' so Ill become some sort of bad performance artist/graphic designer/_____ instead of taking my craft seriously.

And e4nim this is nothing to do with your portoflio, which I agree with S has many strong points, specially "speed", or as I have said before the tone at which it speaks.

rant officially over...

+q - i tried very hard to present my opinion in a fashion that was not insulting, yet your rant seems so defensive. my intention was not to offend you.

cookie-cutter and predictable may be similar, but they are not the same. predictable, for me, has to do with anticipation, expectation. some portfolios, yours included, met my expectations. e4nim's surpassed my expectations and thus impressed me.

i think your portfolio is excellent. i think all the portfolios posted here are excellent and reveal a lot of quality thought and skill. However, no other portfolio made me think differently. no other portfolio made me feel badly that i'm a lazy shit who doesn't take the time to draw more often. no other portfolio made me wonder if i'm passionate enough about what i'm passionate about. no other portfolio made me want to post an opinion to this site. e4nim's did.

it is a beautiful portfolio.

S,
that wasn't really meant at you, just ranting at the unrelated issue.

sorry, if it sounded differently.

J,
"tinpin - tightly packed layouts such as yours are typical for students coming from india. i think it compares favorably with others i've seen."

is a bit judgemental, dont you think??? I dont know if you meant it or not, but your comment reads in a pretty derogatory light to me

I'm sure if you handed in a kick@ss portfolio with 80 pages it will not work against you. If you have that sort of confidence, go for it.

Dang e4 !!! I'm jealous !!! thats a friking awesome portfolio ..

but i'd like to echo the others ... you need to trim it down a bit ... would be quite difficult judging from the quality of your work.

Man I'm feeling low now ... i need to get my act together and finish of my portfolio.

e4nim,

My initial thoughts on your portfolio are somewhat similar. As others have said, I feel that it is much too long and there are projects in there that don't really stand up to the quality set by some of the others. I kind of felt a lot of the length could be taken out by doing away with the title page that has a massive amount of white space for a little text blurb, introducing the project. Also, while some of the full bleeds are nice, maybe there isn't a need for so many. While your artistic renderings, photography, and hand drawings are done extremely well, I felt that they lacked a character or style. I would have included them, I just wouldn't have done full page spreads with them.
In addition, I kind of felt like your professional work really "wowed" me (very nice) while your academic work struggled to reach a sort of level that surpassed a daigrammatic stage. They just felt like they were on the verge of getting to a level of higher detail, but didn't quite make it. For instance, some of the circulation diagrams were quite evident in the final product. Yet, there are many varying methods of representation that I did like throughout the academic projects.
As a final comment, which could apply to a lot of other portfolios, I kinda feel like an 8.5x11 is somewhat of a generic format to work on.
All in all, I would have to say it is quite a nice job and displays a lot of careful documentation of some work that is quite nice.

Best of Luck

First off let me just say that I have been impressed by everyone’s portfolio thus far. Just some background on my portfolio, the layouts are in 8.5 x 11 format, double sided and spiral bound. The JPG's are wide because I did not show the page break on most of the images. I have been out of school for about seven years so there are not a lot of computer renderings because we did not have the technology back then. Actually, this is one of the reasons I am going back to grad school. Let me know what you think..... Thanks

http://www.flickr.com/photos/44154291@N00/

Hey +q. and others with really good portfolios...

I'm in my first year of a 3+ program and looking at all of these portfolios is just making me depressed. I don't feel like the quality of my work is anywhere near this stuff.

So far our studio experience has been highly fragmented. We do 4 projects in ten weeks, all of them completely different. Please tell me you spent more than 2 to 2.5 weeks on these projects. They look gorgeous and the models are so complex (i.e., time consuming to build).

I feel lucky if I can get a reasonably attractive model together for a final crit. Another one is coming up on Wednesday and I feel like I haven't even started on a good design... argh...

mpsyp

mpsyp
that's been a huge challenge for me-turning what they want to see as early stages in the development of designers into decent portfolio-quality work. so far it's been largely about process and little about product. if you want to put a project in your portfolio, aim to make it presentable in that way. every project i do i just imagine that i'm presenting it to someone outside of my program who wouldn't have the inside impressions (i.e. someone who might be reviewing my portfolio). generally, it has worked reasonably well.

other than that, i completely comiserate with the situation of trying to put a portfolio together out of two quarters of disparate work.

joe architect,

The portfolio looks pretty solid as far as its content. The only big comment I would make is that I did not like the brown in the background at all. I would just do away with it completely. It is putting a white border around all of your images that is not doing them any justice. As far as the issue with technology. Sure, in grad school, there will be a heavy use of the computer, but most of the people that I know who are into using animation software and do heavy digital work are using it because the process of using it in their work interests them. I wouldn't necessarily say that the school is going to get you into doing digital work, it is going to be largely up to the student to pursue it within their work.

mpsyp,

That is a pretty quick pace. Ten weeks for four projects. I would maybe take the project that you were into the most or has the most potential and take another look at it over a summer, winter, or spring break. Not only will it give your mind a chance to refresh itself, you will have developed your skills a little more as a designer in that time. Investing some time in furthering a project into a phase of "completion" will give you some more satisfaction. I've done this with a couple projects and it has helped my portfolio greatly. The projects with the quickest pace for myself were the boat rack (2 weeks) and the train station project (6 weeks). Most of the other projects were about 8 to 14 weeks.

mpsyp, don't fret too much about it... my school worked us like dogs the first 3 years to weed out the people who were not serious. Also, in my school you had to get accepted into the 3 year with a portfolio. By the fourth year they gave us more time per project, and I can only assume that this is true of your school as well. If you look at my portfolio all the school projects are from my fourth year.

true ... I remember when I had to do 3 final design submissions in one semester !!! when the third one was declared we decided to protest and boycott the project. But a few arse holes ( and i'm sure every college has a few of them) went ahead and started working on them. well .. we had no other go but to finish it up.

getting back to the subject:- I had done a lot of good work up to my 3rd year ( pre cadd years) which i would have liked to add to my portfolio, but unfortunatley dont have any of them coz all of them were destroyed one way or the other. I though I would cadd tem out from what i remember .... but I guess it's too late now !!

geland, thanks for your comments, and I agree the gray background ended up being a pain to work out. In order to get the "full bleed" double sided I had to print each sheet on 11x17 , cut them and then use PSA adhesive. Next time I will use a white background and save the trouble.

Take a look at mine. I am applying to MS Sustainable Design programs at UT Austin, U Minn. & Carnegie Mellon.

link

thanks

dead link, man

Sorry, this one should work:

link

sammyg_
The content's nice. I'm not feeling the blocks with text that totally interrupt the images. Do you think maybe you could try the text alone on images or perhaps provide space away from images for your text? Bottom line, the opaque pastel blocks interfere.

wow... I didnt realize that there were so many comments for me and my portfolio!! Thanks for your kind concern again and again. I am pretty sure that your priceless comments will be helpful for me to increase my strength.... And I really hope you have good news from graduate school which you wish to attend!

If you have any more comments or something to say, please feel free to send me e-mail.

e4nim, i finally had time to skim the portfolio. my previous comments were general about lenght and such. The work is impressive, I still hold that it is too long, but not by much. I didn't read a word of text that wasn't at least 20pt, but i'm at work and in a hurry. Also, a portfolio should look good without reading a word. Not that words are useless, they must hold their own as well as support, but also should not NEED to be read. Also, i'd probably group the art (keep it in, its good). I don't think the scattering works all that well.

good luck, i'll post mine as soon as I can take care of taxes and fafsa and my car and a competition and... and... sigh.

e4,
what about the fact that you're spending $100/application? yikes!

a hundred bucks is nothing when you consider the document is your number one effort to get into the grad school of your choice.

I see undergrads drink 100 bucks worth of pabst blue ribbon in a weekend.