If you look at the origin of the word portfolio, it comes from an Italian word portafoglio in 1722 which literally means a case for carrying loose papers. Artists back then needed a way to showcase their work and they would carry them about in a case that basically protected their works. Cut to circa 300 years later, and this model is pretty much unchanged. Industrial designers borrowed this model of showcasing work project-wise but struggled hard to communicate their multidimensional skills with each project with text, photographs and sketches.

If you’re an artist or a photographer, no doubt this format works really well, people can leaf through your work without much description and judge what kind of an artist or photographer you are. But if you are a designer trying to showcase your ideation, research, thinking and other intangible skills, this isn’t the most ideal format.

So what I’m trying to do, is turn this format inside out and organize by competencies, using projects to highlight each one. A functional portfolio.

For a potential recruiter, the first 10 second read on most ID portfolios tell people how good the candidate sketches or how well they can render, but doesn’t say much about their thought processes.

The difficult part though is for designers to be able to introspect and come up with characteristics that are important to them in their design process. Also, they need to be sufficiently different from the generic “research”, “brainstorming” terms that don’t say much really. Turns out there is a parallel for this in the resume world which faces a similar problem. People organize resumes based on a chronological order and readers are expected to fish out details from the descriptions that characterize what those people are good at doing. Functional resumes turn that on its head and organize by skills.

Stay tuned for my new portfolio. Coming Summer 2012

My Portfolio v2

My Portfolio