Re: Portfolio and Plans

1. What kind of designer do you want to be, or what do you want to do with this degree? Print, web, user-experience, book, magazine, all of the above? Why?

My background is in writing--I have an MFA in poetry writing, and I've taught English at the secondary (high school) and undergraduate levels. I taught at a high school for six years, and had realized pretty early on that teaching in K-12 might not be fore me. I went to get my MFA and was a lecturer for a year after completing the degree. Lecturers don't make much money and teach four 100-level courses a semester where I was teaching--I was assigned two College Writing courses (an intro composition course) and two literature intro courses each semester. I realized that if I didn't publish like crazy, which wouldn't be particularly likely with the kind of process I have, the best I could do would be to continue as a lecturer for quite a long time, and I just didn't love teaching enough for that. I'd come into the MFA program thinking I might want to design books at some point, and after my year as a lecturer, it seemed like the right time. While I might have been able to get a job in publishing with just my writing degree, it probably wouldn't be design-related, and I wanted to be more confident in my designs to know that I was creating something well, not just the only way I could think to do it. So, more school it was. And yes, everyone in my family jokes that I want to have more degrees than my siblings, or that I just want to be able to put the entire alphabet behind my name in my email signature, but my plan has pretty much always been (at least since I started my writing program) to come out of this and work as a book designer.

2. What kind of workplace do you want, ideally? Freelance, small shop, big agency? Why? How will you search for jobs?

Dream job: the art department of Alfred A. Knopf. They publish some of the best literature and their books are known for the beauty of their designs. But, with the way that book publishing works these days, there aren't that many book designers still working in the publishing houses. Most are freelance and working by contract. An alternate dream job might be designing for a poetry book press, like Four Way Books or Gray Wolf Press. Poetry books tend to follow a formula in cover design of big photograph with serif typeface title and author name, so I can see it being fun to try to change it up.

3. For those of who that have portfolios right now, did you build you own site or use a template like Behance? Or pinterest? Can anyone share links to great portfolios (yours or someone else's?)

I haven't had time to make a portfolio while I've been doing this program--see my last post about the need for sleep and Netflix zoned-out time. I like portfolios that are simple (Kim, that first photography portfolio was lovely), but represent the artist's work well. I think strong portfolios teach you as much about the artist from how s/he decides to arrange it as from the work s/he includes. One of my writing instructors used to say that a novel's first page, a short story's first paragraph, or a poem's first line or two--these first elements teach the reader how to read that novel/story/poem, what kind of reader to be, what to look for, etc. I think the layout of any design does that, as well, but this is especially true for a portfolio. The content chosen tells a story about who you are and what you do, but the way you arrange it should support that story. 

I'm a fan of Lauren Hom's handwritten type--her Daily Dishonesty tumblr is hilarious--and I think her portfolio reflects her work quite well. She's upfront about the fact that her type work is pretty and feminine, and she presents it with a certain Beyonce-esque feminism. You know right away what kind of work you'll get from her.

For elegance, I love Greg Heinimann's portfolio. I know the horizontal scrolling is a bit of a trend, but I think it works really well for a book designer's portfolio because it give the sense of a bookshelf to me. It can also feel like walking through a museum, so I think it works for art/photography portfolios, as well. Again, I think the structure of this site tells you a lot about his style right away.