Industrial Design Professor Critiques Student/Grad Portfolios

hey everybody how's it going so I've been getting a lot of requests to do portfolio reviews on Instagram LinkedIn etc so I thought that I could probably start a series about it now there are a few other design channels doing portfolio reviews the most notable one for Industrial Design Sam does design I highly encourage you to check those out he has really great videos and I'll link those in the description I'm gonna kind of add my own flavor to it though and what I'm going to do is probably do a little bit more of an in-depth analysis of some of the products I'm also going to give these people who submitted their portfolio as a second chance to sort of re review the portfolios in about two or three months time so we can basically see how they progressed how they integrated the feedback and how they've sort of grown as designers which I think could be really interesting if they didn't do anything we can also heckle them publicly on YouTube which is always a lot of fun as well we're not going to have all them on YouTube please don't do that one thing that I want to make clear is that you know I am NOT the final arbiter and judge of all that is good design I would never claim that and that is not something that I'm saying here what I'm presenting here is really one opinion okay so that's one thing that I want to make clear so I'm going to be looking for four main criteria now the first one is just technical skills can they communicate their ideas effectively can they sketch can they render can they 3d model all those things the next thing is the ability to identify and solve problems especially in a unique and novel way so are they able to create designs that fit within the goals of the project and within the goals of the brief the third thing is manufacturing knowledge so do you just understand how things are made you have a genuine curiosity in that are you interested in learning about that then the last thing is a fresh perspective so do you have a perspective that's unique do you bring something new to the table in terms of a skill set in terms of a methodology or line of thinking things like that okay so let's get to it the first one that we have here is for the ball the ball is I don't know if he graduated from CCA but I know it's a student I never him so this will be interesting alright well let's look at the first project here so once again remember the the things I'm looking for so the first thing is technical skill okay so I do see technical skill here this is a really nice rendering really nice modeling skills this may even be parametric or generative design which is really interesting good sketching skills really nice sketching skills really beautiful designs here okay so in terms of technical skill Duvall gets a nice big check at least based on this one project so the next thing is the ability to identify and solve problems okay so one thing to remember is that you know most people don't read any of this stuff especially this no hiring manager will ever read this but because I'm critiquing your portfolio and I want to basically give you good feedback I will so basically it makes it so that it's it creates more resistance I think and that basically allows for better training okay sure I'll buy it however with that said because shoes are such an ergonomically demanding thing and because you're making these claims about resistance and training I would absolutely want to see these prototypes on an actual person and testing them out because my sort of impression is that somebody would use this and immediately roll their ankle or something so I would want proof of that another thing that's really interesting here is that you have a lot of really cool ideas but the final product kind of meshes all of them together and because of that this design isn't very coherent yet so I think what I mean by coherent is that there isn't one particular theme there's a whole bunch of different themes here and they don't necessarily mesh together or relate to each other in any way at the moment so that would be my advice to you and like think about how this resistance training might sort of manifest itself physically that would be my advice to you the next one is this guy curve hairdryer okay so once again technical skills are there nice photography good modeling skills good actual physical model good physical model making skills I see here that there are some consideration for how the internal parts would fit inside which is cool however I wonder about the shape of this design especially since you've branded it as brown a brown product I don't know that this is actually in line with the brand a lot design philosophy and principles so let's actually go in to procreate here and I can tell you about what I mean specifically so first of all Brown is a very minimal design so this feels very flowy and organic kind of which is fine but I don't know that that's brown Brown tends to focus on very sort of geometric shapes so that would be something that you might consider fixing another thing is that Brown I feel like so you have this curve here I feel like this curve would be concentric to the one below it so do something more like that simply because Brown is all about sort of rational design and I'm not quite seeing that here another thing is the balance of this object both functionally and visually there's a lot of visual weight here and hairdryers are all about sort of creating some sort of functional balance that they're comfortable to use really this should probably be the part that holds more of the weight and this is where most of the components should be and then this should be much smaller and if I recall the components should be able to fit in a much smaller casing so I don't know why you need all this length here and it's visually very distracting as well okay so here's sort of my high-level synopsis of Duvall's work I think the vol has a lot of really really interesting and novel ideas Duvall needs to show a little bit more restraint like this is a great example there's a lot of really interesting cool ideas in here individually they're very cool but I don't know how they necessarily fit together and the same thing with the curb hairdryer and how that relates to things I think that this I don't even know what it is oh it's the sculptural radio I think that this seems to have a much more coherent visual language and I think that this is actually really really nice so I would encourage you to sort of learn how to dial things back now this isn't the worst thing in the world because really most of the time more most of the time hiring managers are looking for a lot of ideas from their junior designers so it's okay that maybe you haven't gotten the skill of being able to filter out what the good ideas are versus the bad ones simply because you're going to have a senior designer that's going to help do that for you but you will eventually need to learn this in your career so it's a good skill to have so next up we have Siri Siri was actually one of my first design students at CCA and one thing that really makes Siri stand out is basically her animation skills and her sketching skills she's also just a really easy person to get along with which I can respect as well okay so getting back to the portfolio Siri actually sent me two links looking at technical skill we have a nice layout here we have pretty good models we have decent sketches these sketches are not as good as what Siri is actually capable of doing so I would like to see these improved quite a bit because I know that these are not your best sketches Siri another thing is that if you look at this rendering it's super pixelated especially around the edges and it looks very fake and the reason why it looks so fake is because there doesn't seem to be enough of a texture on this material and that's not really helping it and another thing is that there the lighting is very gray dated I don't know if that's just the sort of settings you're using maybe you're using 8-bit color or something but if you look at ESPA Knox home or a whole bunch of other tutorials on YouTube for a key shot you should definitely look into that I think that'll help this design a lot in terms of problem solving I think this is cool I don't really know anything about refugees so I can't really comment on it this is a really nice image because it tells you everything that you need to know about the design while not having to explain it excessively with words I think that these are totally unnecessary nobody's ever going to read any of this stuff so I would either figure out how to pare it down to just a couple of words and not complete sentences in terms of the design I see that you chose these different colors to induce certain feelings or things I am not convinced by this color palette it's it's very faded it's it's sort of this like very muted pastel color palette I don't know how that necessarily aligns with the needs of refugee children another thing is that this design at least at the moment feels a little bit engineered and not designed this almost looks like a very functional utilitarian structurally engineered piece rather than something that's a toy for children to enjoy so I would challenge you to basically look further into the aesthetics of this more specifically let's get in to procreate here these lines are very straight and I understand why it's because it needs to fit a straight piece of bamboo in here but the most obvious thing to do and I'm not saying that this is how you should do it but this is immediately what I think of just sort of off-the-cuff first impression is if you round this off a little bit it'll help it feel more approachable and friendly and sort of childish and like this hole here is an opportunity right now it's just like a hole that almost looks like it's drilled through the gut design I think that could be a really interesting opportunity these lines are just a bit too straight for these parts here I think that if you just curved those but it'll help it feel a little bit more bubbly and playful because right now all of these are just radii like they're everything sort of like cutouts and radiuses for edges which is what is what's making it feel so sort of so SolidWorks eat basically let's look at one more project from Syria this project is called curio it's a Braille education tool okay renderings immediately much better that's awesome I understand what it is it's a Braille tool okay cool I don't really understand what's happening here this is clearly explaining all this stuff but it's very very hard for me to understand it and then like there's some really nice ergonomic thinking here but it's way in the corner and I would not have noticed it if I wasn't looking very closely so what else I can see that there's some kind of open that up now I can so there's some good sketches here and all this but it's really small and it looks like you actually built a functional prototype or some version one so you should definitely showcase that because that shows that manufacturing knowledge that I was talking about right this also solves a real problem and I feel like the function is in line with what a blind person might need I don't know that for sure I've never designed a product for blind people but the design is really minimal and I think that this very pronounced lip here is what allows the person to sort of feel through how the device works and how to find like the bottom and top of it which is really good overall I think that serious work is solid I think that the area is to improve are just in the technical and rendering skills and the presentation skills because at the moment this really isn't doing you know serious drawing skills justice this you have this really good work around what looks to be a bunch of PCBs but it's not really explained at all anywhere in the design I can tell that there's a lot of thinking behind this particular project based on this but to be quite honest nobody's going to read it so figure out how to express it visually and to it you might need to do it in a video that might be the case so great work overall just a few little tweaks and improvements that need to be made with the presentation so next up is Olivier so one thing that's really nice about oliviers he really thinks through problems and is very sort of measured and rational in his approach I've actually taught him before that's how I know this ok so let's look at the first project here now I'm looking for technical skills at first technically rendering skills are ok you see that little bump there there's a tiny little bump in the highlight I don't know if that's the HDR you're using but I wouldn't be surprised if it was the actual surfacing there's also like some sort of a weird shadow here and I believe that that could be surfacing so technical skills in terms of modeling at surface and could use a little bit of work also this is a pretty convincing rendering but this is definitely not so you might want to do some research into how to do an in context rendering 3 pshaw Espen Oxman has a whole bunch of them and there are others the next thing is just overall presentation is go ahead we have internal components that's awesome so there's actually some really good stuff here this is a nice rendering this is decent there's some big stuff happening in here I think that let's go through the problem-solving aspect I don't fully understand how this works so I I can see that it's for blind people I know who it's more I sort of know what it does it does mapping of some kind but I don't quite understand how or why like why you would need that I mean I know that might seem obvious but one thing to keep in mind is that nobody's gonna read this stuff this stuff right here nobody's gonna read that so that's just something to sort of consider now in terms of the form I wonder how you came up with this shape I think it's good but I think it needs a little bit of refinement so let's go into appropriate really quick so going back into procreate so if we look here this is sort of forming somewhat of an ellipse but it's not quite an ellipse I don't think so this should either be a perfect ellipse or it should be a circle or something else and then once again there's this bump here in the surface and there's a little bump here as well if you look at the shadows and the reflections that you need to kind of work on to sort of refine that surface one thing that I will say is good is that because this is for blind people it's good that it's hard to hold it in the wrong orientation even if you can't see it so what I mean by that is you have a material change in the back here and then that wraps around the bottom so it would be really hard to hold this thing upside down which I respect and appreciate that you thought and you thought into that the next thing is this piece right here and the way that it comes to a point this creates a lot of focus in this area here and even the way you've rendered it does because you have the edge of this highlight butting right into the surface and it it sort of creates a lot of undue attention to that area so I think that this should probably be a little bit more rounded off or maybe straighter or something another thing is that the design right now looks a little bit too much like a price gun or something I don't know how to do that necessarily but I think that because it's so organic it just feels a little bit it feels like it needs some refinement in that regard and what I was talking about with the highlights and the surfacing can the same can be said for the silhouette here I mean it's not super clear what it's what the surfaces are doing and I think they need a little bit more refinement and I think that if you stick with more geometric shapes it will help to sort of elevate the design a little bit one thing that I should mention is that Olivier is actually really good at sort of designing in that sort of elemental style this was a project that he did for my class and this is really an interesting design but I think that what's hurting it is that this is really cool but nobody's going to read it this doesn't have any sort of visual rate so all of the work that you've done that I know you did that that talks about this sort of use case is lost these are really great sketches too so figure out how to Munich ate this and it might end up being through a video in fact it probably will be through a video this is also a little bit blown out here this light so look up some tutorials I think will give ins has one about how to do lighting specific to LEDs and stuff s binocs foam probably has some just look up online how to do that on YouTube okay so overall Olivier has some really good ideas and really good thinking the only thing is that he's not really expressing it in his presentation so I think that would be the best thing for you to sort of work on the live array and I have a lot of respect for the fact that you sort of went through the entire product development cycle here where you have an app that you designed you put some consideration into how all this stuff would fit together there's some really good thinking here really nice models now it's just a matter of expressing the functionality which I think was really compelling about this project which just isn't shown here yet so next up is Karen Wayne Karen Wayne I believe is entering their senior year of Industrial Design at CCS she was also one of my first students so one thing that's really great about Karen is that she's willing to take big risks with her designs and she really does a lot of research to understand how the product will fit into a larger scope but really her biggest asset is she has excellent craftsmanship skills excellent sketching skills and once again she's willing to take risks with her designs which I have a lot of respect for all right so let's look at them so we have micro sense here this is really blown out so let's go through technical skills so technical skills cool presentation style these sketches are not your best sketches I've seen you do better ones this is a nice sketch one thing to keep in mind with sketches or models or anything is that you're going to be judged by your worst sketch your worst rendering your worst 3d model your worst project so that's something to consider when you're sort of doing this design work all right so technical skills are good I know that they're good but these sketches need help and I know you can do better and this rendering these help so it's a little bit blown out around the edges here once again look up the YouTube tutorials that I talked about in the other and the other parts of this video let's actually look through the problem-solving stuff okay so it's a microscope ok those are actual microscope slides and then these are sort of artistic watercolors that's interesting so this seems to be this is cool so I like that you actually went through the prototypes and you built actual slides which are really beautiful so that's awesome this is a beautiful shot right here very compelling however the only issue is that this hand here that hand looks like a zombie hand or something because the color from the rendering is making it look sort of greenish blue like it's dead so maybe maybe work on fixing that I think that you should put this particular image earlier in the process so you can sort of understand what's happening and you should also put a person using it even if it's just a prototype somewhere earlier in the presentation because it wasn't super clear to me how this thing works in terms of the design I think it's actually pretty proportionally nice I think that this is a really nice touch here for this sort of tie-dye effect to reflect the slides my understanding is that the slides are being projected onto this surface I don't quite understand why there's a person painting though one thing that I do really like is that this rendering is in perspective which is awesome I think you need more images like this that are really evocative and interesting and I think that you should make the use case a little bit more clear and that could be through a video it could be through a series of images showing how it works and things like that next project flow ok I've actually designed a whole bunch of faucets so this will be interesting I've actually seen this project before as well I did some critique on it alright okay so when you're rendering water like this you want to put some sort of aeration or bubbles in it otherwise it just looks like a sheet of glass that would be one piece of advice that I have for you technical skills are good there's a lot of really good modeling from auto making exploration here I think it could be made bigger and more clear these sketches are decent but not your best so better sketches now here's the big issue here I don't see I don't fully understand how this design relates to your use case so you obviously did some level of user research it's basically it's basically a faucet that helps with babies I guess like bathing them in the sink I would assume that that's a thing that I've ever heard of that that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen but okay so that's the use case I don't understand how this super organic form relates to that and I also don't understand how the super organic form relates to Google's design language so if you look at these faucets here these seem to be much more in line with Google sort of approachable friendly housewares electronics design language then what are the one that you've chosen to me I don't fully understand it so let's get into it there's a surfacing issue that's happening around the handle here where the handle meets the main body that needs some help I think that having the faucet point downward downwards in this way I recall you mentioning that it has a functional purpose but it's not shown anywhere in the presentation so you need to show that there's a touch screen here cool this area right here is a bit odd it draws a lot of attention because it has a lot of visual mass in that area and it's also a bit strange in the sense that it's unfamiliar and the surfacing needs further refinement so typically even when you're doing organic surfacing there still needs to be some sort of a skeleton usually there usually needs to be some sort of a skeleton of like geometric shape some sort of rational surfacing behind it so for example you have what is essentially arks to form the spout here and this faucet you would still want to do that for the other designs that are hyper organic okay so I think that pretty much covers it I think that we have some good designs here there's a chance for you guys to redeem yourselves in about two months time to see how you progressed if you don't do any of the work that will be very sad I understand that one at least one of you got internships so congratulations on that and I'm really excited to see your progress and I hope that this was helpful if there's anything unclear about this review please just let me know in the comments and I'll add some more clarity and some more definition around what I mean by certain things and thanks for tuning guys if you like this video do not forget to subscribe definitely encouraging and it helps me out a lot thank you almost at a thousand subscribers which is really awesome we have grown from 100 subscribers two months ago up to almost a thousand so thank you guys so much for subscribing thanks for checking out the videos I really really appreciate it very much [Music]

Channel: Design Theory

Views: 26,513

Keywords: industrial design, Design Theory, Design Language, Design, Design Analysis, Design Review, Industrial Design Education, Sketching, Design Education, design school, industrial design school, industrial design tutorial, proportion, poduct design, product design language, Visual Proportion, Design Hierarchy, Design Tutorial, design sketching, ideation techniques, id sketching, portfolio, portfolio review, industrial design portfolio, design portfolio, critique, portfolio critique

Id: i_WN8jvRD-4

Length: 24min 37sec (1477 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Fermented_Mucilage]

Great video. I like how you go beyond technical skills like sketching and rendering and question the association of the design to the brand. The hair dryer and the faucet would be better off without any branding and you're very right that the sneakers would be ankle killers. I think that when you have a radical idea you should always ask yourself why it hasn't been done before.

I don't agree with some of the unbranded organic vs geometric opinions. They're opinions that would require some deep diving into the context of the product. For example, on that refugee toy, adopting your suggestions would potentially increase material usage and make the molds way more complex and expensive.

And remember how you praised the ps5 design? If it was a student project you would have said that it doesn't match sony's design language because it's too organic.

I also don't agree that hiring managers don't read anything. Some do, some don't. Not everything can be explained with images and if the hiring person can't be bothered to read a few lines of text, maybe that person shouldn't be hiring people at all. I think it's highly disrespectful to the amount of hours that those projects took to execute as well as the time that it took to present them.

Again, great video. It's good to see portfolio reviews that actually review design choices. On a following video I would suggest that you try to read and understand the sketches a bit more than commenting on how good they look.