“The job of a portfolio is to show the thinking behind your design solutions that solved end users’ needs and business owners’ problems. You need to write about both.”
Yesterday I received an email from one of my Portfolio Prep course students. I will call her Jane. Jane stated that the hardest part for her when it came to creating her portfolio was what to actually write about in her projects.
When I added this insight to some other comments I have received, I realized that a lot of people struggle with where to start when it comes to the writing portion of their case studies.
The key thing to get started with when writing about your work is the Project Overview. It is the “what and why” of you project. This should explain what the client hired you for and what the solution was. The rest of the case study should be the story about how you did the work to arrive at that solution.
The following blog post is the response I sent her and it contains a basic formula for how I approach this critical starting point of what to write for your design portfolio, as well as some examples:
My response:
Dear Jane,
I like each project in my portfolio to have a basic structure. This gives me a template as a starting point to work with every time and I can adapt it as needed. It looks like this:
Part 1: The Project overview
The Project Overview is a quick story about what the project was and should answer these questions:
• What was the client’s business goal? Why did they hire you or what was their need?
• What was the desired outcome for the audience/end user?
• What hurdles (if any) were present that made the work challenging?
• Were there insights you discovered that made the design problem more interesting?
• What was my role in the project?
• Was I part of team or was it just me on the project?
• What did I contribute?
Here is the formula I use for every Project Overview:
Client _____ came to us with a need for ______.
We were excited to tackle this opportunity but creating _______ was challenging because of ________.
As a result, we designed _________, which solved the client’s business problem and resulted in _________ kind of experience for the end user/consumer.
Example for iPhone app (digital product)
The Opportunity
Penguin Random House was looking to help their author, Haylie Pomroy, reach an increasingly digital market with her #1 New York Times bestseller, The Fast Metabolism Diet. To better serve this audience, there needed to be a way to get the books information into their hands whenever and wherever they needed it. An app was the perfect solution to help Haylie’s followers at scale.
The Hurdle
One of the biggest reasons people fail at diets is because it is too much change too fast. Managing the complexity of a new diet is hard enough, but when people have to choose between that and managing their already busy lives, something has to give, and it is usually the diet. Which left us thinking, how can we best use technology to help people manage all that complexity in a way that wasn’t too fast and overwhelming?
The Solution
We designed an experience that broke down the diet plan into a set of user-friendly tools that encouraged daily use. Since users of this app would vary significantly between weight loss goals, dietary needs, and physical capabilities, the tools would have to be flexible as they guided people through the following tasks:
• Menu creation
• Grocery Shopping
• Meal planning
• Tracking intake
• Exercise planning
This resulted in an app that reduced the diet’s complexity down to manageable chunks and provided a gradual path towards user’s goals.
Example for printed banner (graphic design collateral)
The Opportunity
The local university wanted to create large printed banners to hang all over campus so students would know that there was an upcoming event for returning alumni.
The Challenge
We wanted the banner design to be part of the campus environment and work with it in a way that incorporated real world objects around them into the visual and written messaging of the banner. Which made us wonder, how could we inform people walking by about the event but also engage them in a way that made the experience memorable and more interesting for both them and returning alumni?
The solution
As a result, we got the idea to use old photos of alumni in spots on campus that still existed and hung the banners in those same spots, giving a feeling like you were looking back in time when you walked by the banners. This created a feeling of visual interest for passer-byes that connected them to the history of the college, while simultaneously surprising and generating conversations for the returning alumni who found themselves as part of the event’s narrative.
Example for food packaging (production design)
The Opportunity
The Heinz corporation was looking to create packaging for their new condiment product. The brand team had worked hard to create a brand experience that differentiated the new product from other products on the shelf within grocery stores and were excited to get the new product out on shelves.
The Challenge
The new condiment came in several new sizes of packaging, from small on-the-go squeeze packets to 4 off-the shelf purchase sizes. This presented a challenge when it came to taking the brand team’s design work and translating into a cohesive customer experience across all the various sized packaging. Which made us wonder, what were the key elements of the branding that we wanted to emphasize across all packaging to create continuity aside from the logo?
The Solution
To create continuity for customers finding the condiment in different shopping environments, I took the primary color palette and found a way to make it the key identifier for the packaging so it could be spotted and differentiated from competing products near it. To achieve this, I proposed we use different colors for different sizes but that still made the variations feel cohesive as a group, as opposed to one look at just different sizes. This is an unusual move, but working closely with the branding team, this led to a more playful representation of the product that actually enhanced the products visual narrative and uniqueness amongst competing brands.
Part 2: The Project Narrative
After you develop your basic narrative for a project in the Project Overview, you then need to add details about the process of creating the design solution you outlined in the narrative.
To learn more about this, I created a blog article that lists details of things you may want to consider putting into each project. Those details are here:
If you want to see it in action, you can check out my actual portfolio example, here:
Cheers,
Chris
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