Hi my name is Rina, I just finished my diploma in Architecture, I am looking to find a job/internship before I continue my studies. Below is my portfolio, I have been told that it is quite weak but have no idea in what way, please feel free to give me any comments, thank you
Going to be really honest, it’s not great, but I will tell you why.
Your renderings do not look good. The gallery is the best you have, and it’s a mediocre quality at best. The others are of really bad quality. This is hard to excuse nowadays since rendering is one of the things you’re expected to be good at coming out of school. The tools available now also make decent renderings much easier to produce, so having bad looking renderings is really rough. I’m not a stickler for photo-realistic renderings, though it’s a helpful thing to have in your pocket as a fresh grad. I like stylized, but then they need to have … style. Your renderings don’t really exhibit the ability to produce rendered images of decent photo-realism, stylization (which would show your skill with other tools), or generally ability to post process images with photoshop. Also, your hand rendering is not very good. I couldn't do better, which is why I wouldn't try.
Your general graphic design is pretty bad. The layouts are cluttered, there is a lot of extraneous graphic elements (the dots?) and again it just looks like you have not done enough design school, or looked at enough other portfolios, or professional architectural presentations to know what you’re doing. The cleanest looking thing are the technical drawings….
Which leads me to the technical drawings. There is a difference between a technical drawing for a set, and a technical drawing for a presentation/portfolio. Look at magazines that have technical drawings in them like arch record or something, or other people’s portfolios. It should be stripped of extraneous construction oriented materials, typically relabeled, and graphically adjusted for the scale and intent of a portfolio. Part of the value of this is also getting rid of things that are just wrong at a glance. Having too much hardline drawing like this in a school portfolio is tough because you don’t actually know what you’re doing. The graphics and drawing information will be objectively wrong or bad, I could go into a lot of detail about that for your portfolio but I won’t. This relates to issues with content prioritization….
Which leads me to … content. The actual design intentions are something I’m not interested in delving into in your portfolio because of how much else there is to comment on. However, what I will say is that you seem to be making a grave mistake on content prioritization for applications. Now, maybe It’s different elsewhere in the world, but in the US there is very little expectation of serious technical documentation out of students, and again, that’s because it will not be good. However, you seem to be including a lot of the more thought based diagrams, research, and ideas in your boards that you’ve relegated to an unreadable scale on your second page. Instead you have dedicated a huge portion of your portfolio to rough technical documents. The floor plans, enlarged toilet plans (that are really bad), and … plumbing riser diagrams (you dedicated a whole page to this thing that I cannot imagine any architect ever wanting to see in a portfolio) … Anyway, lost my train of thought there. Instead of having all of that, expand out the information and design development content you generated for your boards (and remove the tiny little boards). A student portfolio ideally has a lot of renderings/perspectives, a lot of diagrams/research/etc to explain the thought of the project, and a little bit of technical drawing, and a little bit of text. You can even get away with removing the technical drawings all together if you just have a technical bend on some of the explanatory materials or renderings.
Richard Balkins
Jan 5, 24 2:14 pm
I'll add... portfolios is a form of professional communication. In any professional communication, you must consider who your audience is. Therefore the whole purpose of the portfolio is to communicate to an intended audience other than yourself unless you like talking to just yourself about plumbing risers and toilets. So, WHO is your intended audience. What I said here does not negate what natematt said or what others may say or write.
Next thing is, what are you trying to communicate across? What's the story? What are you trying to communicate about the portfolio? What is your message or story?
Hi my name is Rina, I just finished my diploma in Architecture, I am looking to find a job/internship before I continue my studies. Below is my portfolio, I have been told that it is quite weak but have no idea in what way, please feel free to give me any comments, thank you
https://issuu.com/rina.aminudd...
Going to be really honest, it’s not great, but I will tell you why.
I'll add... portfolios is a form of professional communication. In any professional communication, you must consider who your audience is. Therefore the whole purpose of the portfolio is to communicate to an intended audience other than yourself unless you like talking to just yourself about plumbing risers and toilets. So, WHO is your intended audience. What I said here does not negate what natematt said or what others may say or write.
Next thing is, what are you trying to communicate across? What's the story? What are you trying to communicate about the portfolio? What is your message or story?