I've heard it said that your best projects should be first, to provide a strong first impression for the reviewer. I've generally followed this in my own portfolio, but I'm curious to see what others have to say.

Also, I've found it interesting that what I consider some of my "best" projects sometimes get only a passing glance by the interviewer, while what I consider a "dog food project" at the back of the portfolio generates a great deal of interest. Weird.

i've taken a different approach altogether and created small books for individual projects/classes. then during the interview/discussion as point emerges that i feel relates to one of my projects, i share that book. for example, if the discussion starts with real estate then i'd use one of the books that i created from one of my real estate projects with mba & law students, then if the discussion turns to landscape, i might pull out the book i made for my wetlands project and so forth.

it's got nothing to do with what you percieve as your best/worst projects but rather the questions you should be asking yourself are: who is my audience? and what is relevant to them? during an interview, it's important to listen and alter your strategy according to their needs/desires/etc. i've created a nice stack of these books over the years and frankly there's no way that i could cover all of them during an interview anyhow, but they allow for some flexibility.

the other nice thing about this approach is that it makes it easy to integrate new work because you don't have to figure how to fit it into your old portfolio or, worse yet, start over and redesign your entire portfolio. when i finish a project, i simple create a new book and that's it. documentation done. admittedly, some of the older ones look dated, but this also allows me to exhibit any progression in my work in an honest and forthright manner. hopefully, it will be apparent that i've learned a few things along the way.

on the negative side, this doesn't work so well if you need to mail a portfolio. for that i've created a very simple sampling of work that i can easily print out at home. typically about 12 double-sided pages of work featuring maybe six projects and using 1-2 pictures each with no more than a paragraph of text. i've generally found that few people spend more than five minutes evaluating a portfolio (unless they are doing you a favor as a friend) and i try to keep it simple with respect to that premise. harsh as it sounds, most reviewers will have formulated an opinion on you in less than a minute of flipping through your portfolio (particularly if you're not there to explain), so think of it as a tease...yeah, that's a good start.

anyhow, that's how i've been documenting my shit.

well, my worst project got thrown in the trash and i refuse to talk about it with anyone...

in all seriousness, put something good at the beginning and at the end. it's like papers: your professors only remember the beginning and end because that's what they read.

i split the portfolio up into 2 sections: academic and professional work. each contained projects in reverse chronological order. the academic work came before the professional section. this also meant that the weakest academic project came last. and right after came the strongest professional project. so each let-down was followed by something nice and pretty...