I heard of someone who tried to use some name-dropping...as in showing themselves photographed with some BIG NAME people on a single, double page spread...

I heard of someone who's portfolio cover was made of rusty metal and it cut a reviewer's hand. They had to get a tetanus shot.

that's what you call 'makin' an impression'....er, 'incision'.

Note to self: Reconsider portfolio made of razor blades with barbed wire binding.

One student submitted a project containing a sealed bag of fake blood. I don't know if I'd call it the worst though; as I remember it, he got in. One applicant had gone to hairdressing school and sent photos of her experimental hairstyles. Anyone who sent CDs, videos, etc. was automatically rejected.

The worst were usually not far-out or outrageous, but just plain boring. Anything complicated or difficult to operate annoyed everyone and ended up a torn-up mess on the floor after six or seven people had struggled with it and given up. Plain wire binding = good idea.

I put mine all in a red duotang binder in the last minute. I was mortified when everyone got theres back to see all the nice wood boxes etc. and then I just laughed. I guess it was better than when I walked into my interview for my B.A. with a green garbage bag full of images. Looking back I can laugh and I think my profs would too because I just didn't know any better but I honestly was one of the better students in my class.

The content was good just not packaged very well...... thank good I 've learned.

I got this portfolio from a guy named Living in Gin...the thing sucked

I'm hoping to make my portfolio Matrushka Doll-style. It will come in a big box, with a slightly smaller box inside of it, and then an even slightly smaller box within that one, and so on and so on, until they get to a teeny tiny box, out of which will leap a little mouse who has been trained to clamp onto the jugular. That will make an impression. I'll call it Discursive Policies of Rhetorical Insight.

LOL geimanj!

I heard of one person who submitted 3 portfolios - 1 of his own artwork, and 2 of his modelling portfolios, mostly half naked.

And of course there are the ginger-bread houses...

when i applied to grad school, the "portfolios" were submissions of work on slides. does this not happen anymore? anyway gin from your work i don't think you need to worry about getting into the schools your talking about. the combination of studio and real world plus the fact that you won an eames chair looks golden to me.

Thanks for the boost... I worry that being a CAD monkey for so long has sapped any design creativity out of me.

I'll be sure to list the Eames Chair on the "Awards and Honors" section of my grad school applications.

when i applid to fine arts the portfolio was all slides...late 80'S.

for arch school it was always stuff in binders.

had one friend who did his up in a wood box. lovely. redundant. boring. not bad, just boring. he works now for a not bad but boring office...

whistlers example sounds fine to me. worst portfolios are those without content and no organisation, but the student clearly doesn't know it. very painful to look through those.

half of my schools want slides, the other half want CDs. Nobody wants print. So the art schools are still like that.

Weird... All of my schools are asking for prints only. Certainly makes my job easier, although the cost of inkjet cartridges is a bitch.

When I worked at a design firm, our admin manager person reported having receiving regular updates of the same person's resume, portfolio, and cover letter. She'd gotten it every few months for a couple of years. My firm had never responded to this person's solicitation, because the work and experience was rather unimpressive, and they were a small firm and did not need any more employees. Reportedly the communications grew incrementally more desperate and weird with each re-send.

The reason I found out about this is because I walked into her office one day to inquire about something and I caught her at her desk with the umpteenth packet of his materials in her hand, muttering, "It's so sad... so sad..."

jesus that's a depressing story, s.surface

the worst I have seen were failed attempts at handycraft. one in particular had very little worthwhile content, and was 'jazzed' up with cloth-covered chipboard covers, bound with extra large metal rings that were far too loose, and images printed nonproffesionally on some kind of hemp paper. before opening it, it just felt loose and unfilled, and looked like a souped up paper bag.

but it still got the person a decent job, so well done i guess.

I can think of a few very bad portfolios, but they were so uniquely bad that I think it would be bad form to talk about them here, lest their creators recognize themselves.

There are some more common "bad portfolio" infractions that bug me everytime I see them:
The project labeled "Feminist Space" (or something along those lines) that is indistinguishable from any other space except that it is pink...
The photo of the applicant's parents' apparently ordinary porch or sunroom addition - accompanied by several paragraphs of text about "exploring the boundaries of suburban domesticity in the 21st century"...
The unintelligible "process drawing", when accompanied by a list of film-makers, composers, chefs, or other heroes who "informed" the artist. (But I'm usually a fan of the unintelligible process drawing on its own...)
The Found Object Map of the project's site (especially common to projects created in junior-year housing studios.) This is usually an enlarged street map with litter glued to the intersections at which the litter was collected...
Models carved out of phone books.
Models carved out of food.
Digital models/renderings that are recognizable, verbatim examples from popular software tutorials.
Project descriptions that start with "This project was very important to me because it related to themes central to my life right now" (especially when the themes are: change, growth, clarity, confusion, grief, fear, hope, turmoil, or suburban domesticity...)

The layout that I've always hated are the 10 tiny drawings/diagrams on top of a complicated rendering or photo at 50% saturation. The rendering looks ugly at 50%, and the diagrams are all so tiny that you can't read them, and the quantity of information trying and failing to be conveyed by this just makes me angry for some reason.

that's art!!!!!

Bloopox, if you were a 'scaper, you'd have a much greater appreciation of the urban context and found objects...

Sorry to resurrect this thread, but I wanted to share my ultimate portfolio pet peeve:--

students who, in their portfolios, use commercially outsourced renderings for their academic designs (usually to some overseas 3d sweatshop), and who, with these images, manage to con admissions committees. This practice is unrequited evil on a Dick Cheney scale :)

wow, that's brilliant, urbanist. it combines all my interests: selling out, outsourcing, laziness, lack of creativity, and cheating. thanks for the advice!

HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! People really do this?

We had got one that had aluminum covers and was bolted together. When we put it on the table to look at it, it scratched the shit our of our table. We threw it right in thee trash.

I sent mine on a velvet pillow.

I ended up doing a handmade embossed digipak for my cd portfolios. Nothing too fancy, much less fancy than the previous ideas, which I scrapped due to time constraints.

hehe Medusa, but sometimes its fun to drop the generic 3ds max teapot into things... it's iconic.

Excuse me for being out of touch, but are you guys talking about academic admissions portfolios? Or do people actually send gimmicky wood/metal/sculptural/hemp/frankenstein bolted portfolios to prospective employers?

How about an exploding portfolio?

Collection of sketches, no descriptive text or anything to go alongside, many empty pages in the end. This wasn't very impressive, nor was it memorable.

I also (personally) don't like when applicants show their practical experience by including their Firm's portfolio sheets (the ones the company would use for proposal calls). It reminds me of some coworkers that would stuff those pages into their portfolio for just working on the project for 3 days - they were impressive spreads, nice graphics, good layout, awesome render, official write-up (all of which prepared by someone else) - but hollow to me. I don't know how everyone else feels about this?

velo, i keep former firm portfolio sheets in my professional portfolio i show at interviews, but i did not put them in a recent academic submission.

i'm curious though, why is text so important? isn't there an argument that work should be read on its own? - sketches, drawings, and such....not so much architectural projects. again, just curious.

As finished work, yes, but your portfolio is intended to illustrate your process and your thought process as much as it is the finished project. If you can do this effectively in images only, go for it, but, more often than not, text helps:-- what design problem are you trying to solve? What site and programmatic conditions given to you a priori, need to be accommodated in your design process? what is that process? why did you devise or choose it?

besides.. some sleazeball without any process or creativity is going to show a more impressive final work product than you do because he has outsourced that output to some 3d render-monkey chained to a desk in an industrial suburb of Timbuktu

do you have any comments on this j?

interesting enough, having been on a portfolio review committee, i would have to say that by and large they come from american students. i have no idea what it was, but all of the best portfolios i came across were from korea and taiwan.

the best one i had ever heard of was a photographer who put images of his work on unexposed photo paper, in a black folder. when the reviewers opened them up, the images began to appear and eventually became black.

bossman, did the photographer's portfolio only really work for the first reviewer due to overexposure?

Overheard in the admissions committee:

"Hey, look at these cool photos!... Wait... Oh, shit. No, I swear, they were great... You should have seen them..."

that is correct

architect type people do love black

architects or 80's rockstars?

i know a guy that was in a very good band before grad school
and submitted his CD in the back...looked pretty cool
his other stuff was top drawer stuff as well.

I can just hear it now...

♫ I study with my fingers...I study with my toes
balsa's all around me
and so the model grows... ohh yes it does yes it does♫


and bossman... that's such a nice idea for the portfolio. I'd be way too scared to ever do that though. I'm sure I'd bottle it and stick printed versions in the back or something. Was there even an explaination note saying something along the lines of 'These are not blank sheets - please don't look away or I'll never get accepted'?