Last week, I went to a scholarship portfolio exhibition hosted at the Art Center. My Graphic Design teacher recommended us to go to see what strong, developed portfolios look like, and I’m really glad I went! All of this is so different from what you see at Caltech; it’s so refreshing and creative (and also a bit overwhelming).

I’m not that familiar with the arts, so at first I didn’t really know what I was looking at. There were tables set up for each person whose portfolios were displayed, and most people had hanging posters, a device playing a video or showing a website, and several books or items they’d made on the table.

One thing I found amazing was that people actually wrote and printed out whole books as projects — I feel like there’s so many factors to take into account, like the dimensions of the book, the color, the font, the type of paper, as well as the layout and the actual content! As an example, below, there’s a biography of Murakami and books on fashion and encoding.

Some people also had their process books open, which is a book that contains information on how that person executed the project from beginning to start, including doing research, initial designs/thoughts/explorations, to e.g. logo and logotype development, refinement, and applications to systems.