it looks great actually! what year are you in?

Thanks saf, been out and in Asia for a few years 

Great looking portfolio, very interesting concept for organizing it and narration throughout.

What was it like living/working in Japan though? I'm very interested in the country myself and would love to spend extended time there, but it's never seemed practical or available? 

Outstanding folio!

You make this fellow VT alumni proud!

And I like your modesty and attitude.  It will really take you a long way.  You should apply to our firm.  We have offices all over the world including several in Asia!

Pages 15-16 stick out. Everything in the portfolio is orthogonal, except these two pages. 

mytton: Working in Japan is challenging but entirely worthwhile. The Japanese think on a different wavelength than western designers.  

med: Much appreciated! Hokies! 

Randh: Thanks! 

Good work, and I like the concept for organizing the portfolio around the 3 main ideas.. gives it some logic. Here's my suggestions:

-Overall it feels a bit crowded to me.. I find it hard to concentrate on any one image on each page because there's several competing. Maybe a little more white space/fewer images or text per page could help with this to let the best images breathe a little.

-Like I said, the country/attribute (I don't really know what to call it) is a great way to organize, but I'm not convinced you need 4 pages (two spreads) for each section break, especially when those spreads contain only one photograph. Perhaps you could spread the other images out to these pages to solve the above issue, or just combine the country and attribute to one page. You want people looking at the projects, and if there's too many pages before the good stuff, they may lose interest.

square: I think you're right about the spreads, I wondered about it too. I'm starting a 2mb version (hate applications these days) so I'll get to clean up the pacing and clutter a lot. Thanks for the feedback! 

very nice.

also curious about your experience - and tips on coffee shops in Kagurazaka!

overall, agree with Square, it could use some white space, especially if you're coming out of the gate with wabi-sabi. it's pretty jam-packed.

a couple tiny things:

pp 33-34, text captions difficult to read against the background

p 44 utilize soft returns, so you don't have hyphens in significant words: "Ambiguous" and so on. Actually, page 2 as well, "Architecture" on p 18. If you are using InDesign, you can control the amount of hyphenation in the paragraph style definition.

p 40, 52, I would typically do some perspective correction here, your call

p 52 woodworking, single word

p 60 suggest to justify column of text either left or right 

again, great work!

-oG

oG: Thanks for the feedback I'll look into them!

Nice! Kagurazaka is one of my favorite places in Tokyo (especially for food!) I'd be happy to divulge some secrets, haha. 

Pretty intriguing... read like a magazine, which works well in this case.  I think you're renderings are so powerful that they overwhelm the drawings that I think you're trying to present.  I'm sort of both mystified and confused at what I'm looking at because I see a lot of sculptural edifices, but have a hard time dissecting them through the Sections.

JayCon: Makes sense, thanks for the feedback. I'd like to experiment with overlaying layers on my drawings to make them a lil more legible. Thoughts?

I think it's a good idea... my portfolio often showed a rendered environment merging with the technical drawn aspects of that building.  It was like I was dissecting a building an actual building and to help draw attention to my layout and or scale, I allowed the area inside to be black and white.  I found that to be the best way to bring someone's eyes into my building process.

I wanted them to envision the building from the outside, draw them in, and show them how it worked.