Portfolio review with @Viviano Villarreal-Bueron

you remember the movie jerry maguire uh where she says you had me at hello by the third project you should have your person who's reviewing the portfolio interested in if not you they're not going to be interested no matter if it's 20 projects don't expect them to be interested by the last project subscribe to bless dark for your doors of art architecture and design and hit the bell icon so you never miss an update so hey guys welcome back to the very first episode of ba portfolio review we have viviano with us and he's we together are going to be discussing three portfolios today so first of all viviana thank you for being here hey richard great to be back with you all right but before we start this video and before we start going start discussing the portfolios let me tell you a little bit about viviano now a lot of you might know viviano already by the interview that i did with him but those of you who have not seen that video let me tell you a little bit about him viviano is an architect from mexico who has spent five years working at oma with rem kulas after he left oma he has now started his own architectural firm called mass operations he also has a master's degree from psych and today he not only works as an architect but he also teaches in many places so viviano has both a lot of academic knowledge and a lot of work experience in the field so before we can start our portfolios today let us first get to know what viviano looks for in a portfolio so i know according to you what are the elements that make a good portfolio well i guess uh i would well elements that make up a portfolio is i think a broader topic but what i can what i look for a portfolio when i receive them in in my office and we're doing the hiring process i think would center around four things uh number one would be organization skills as a designer as an architect and when you're seeking a position whether it be applying at a office or a studio or applying at a master's program phd etc you want to really show all of your work and usually we have a lot of work to show and for each one project you want to show a lot of images and models and stuff so you need to kind of have the ability to compress the information to digest it to kind of boil down to the most important aspects of the project and then organize them neatly and then it's a sequence of projects so it all has to do with organization at the end it's this ability to compress downsize downsize minimal minimum minimal most important and well organized so that's the first thing obviously the second thing with that has to do with graphic design so a portfolio a lot of it unfortunately is graphic design and you need to be careful that the graphic design doesn't overpower your designs which happens a lot unfortunately so you can have a beautifully designed portfolio with not that great conceptual work however you know that person can come into the office and i can try to teach them conceptual way of thinking but they have a really good graphic design so that's good third point is their designs so how do you think about design how do you conceptualize and so forth and i think that the fourth one is their ability to document a project there's a difference between good graphic design and good documentation skills and so i'm talking about how to do a exploded exonometric how to do a perspective section uh and detailed drawings for construction documents for example so i think around those four aspects is what i'm really looking for forward or looking for in a portfolio all right that sounds great and i would actually be picking your brain throughout our conversation throughout discussing your portfolios uh and we'll go deeper into the the elements that you just put out as well and i have some more questions for you as we go ahead as well all right so uh we're gonna start with our first portfolio for the day and that is the portfolio of anuj modi okay uh first impressions with first of all white background which is what i really like to see in portfolios i tend to not want to see black backgrounds and i tend to not want to see textured backgrounds i think it distracts from the designs great to see a white background portfolium uh i think perhaps in a way it's too many projects anushar has a large and i'm flipping through it right now has a large index which is great and it's it's the projects are numbered according to their page insertion which again is great many times you forget to number your pages or they're wrong and it's really important for your interview process because if you do get selected which is you know the first step and you get asked to do an interview a person like myself who's interviewing is going to ask you so on page 15 your project so and so how did you did you do that by yourself was that in collaboration if there's no page number and i say oh the diagram on the left between so and so project it becomes harder so always number your pages but that comment is that i think it's a little bit too much i would never show more than six projects the other thing is um anush breaks uh a format so i think of the three portfolios that that i got to review that you sent me this was the most successful format it seems to be an extended a3 i don't know exactly what it is but it's what best fits the screen and your portfolio is going to be reviewed on the screen and it should feel like a book but it's going to be reviewed in a screen so in that sense it's great but i'm talking about the layout format inside uh i know she establishes a very rigorous format but then it's broken if you're gonna establish a layout format don't break it and if you're gonna go from one topic to another say like cv's one topic my projects are another project and then my representation skills are another one include covers in that sense that's my initial reactions to the portfolio okay so uh let us now what we'll do is we sort of will go uh page by page sort of looking at the folio so for the second page i initially i really like that it is a very clean way of just putting down what your education like the cv part it's a very very and the index part i think it's a very clean way of showing it is much cleaner than what i did in my portfolio i think mine would be one of the portfolio that would be immediately thrown out but i really like how clean everything is here what are your thoughts here yeah again organization is very important graphic design is very important cleanliness exactly right uh it's a white background it has a little bit of a kind of like a gray hatch lines that's great it works it doesn't distract uh there's an image of a project perhaps that was not required or there's an image that's not needed an image i am lacking though unfortunately is a photo so you're hearing it from me someone that was reviewing portfolios inside oma and i review portfolios in my office when we're hiring which is not that very often but i do and if i'm going to hire you i want to see your face i think here he removed it for the video but i i think i really uh understand what you mean but again what you said about not being shy is i think then fits in here well just a note to that and i i make that comment as a general comment not only to uh anush regardless if he removed it just for the purposes of this video or not all right so let's move on to our first project all right your thoughts on this well uh first of all i really appreciate it in a digital form to look at the printout so i can tell a lot about without getting into the project because it's too small scale to understand it honestly i'm reviewing this i'm gonna see this in two seconds what i see here is the ability to do to lay out a page for a project that's the layout and i see that this is a larger compilation that ended up in a book i hope so i do see it's a thesis project so i'm assuming it is a larger project and it's just too big of information collected in research and and so forth to properly uh talk about the design but the layout of the page is very nice this light gray works perfectly there is care taken in the positioning of the booklet you know it's lifted there's a shadow it's great in that sense it's a very first nice page um and this sets out the layout for each project right so you've got index information on the left who's a mentor was it part of a university project what semester was it a small description and then the images of the project so it's a great starting point for the portfolio i saw that this project was ongoing and i think that is why he still doesn't have you know uh everything in here but what i wanted to ask was then would you appreciate i mean i i understand what you were talking about establishing the layout and from here forth you understand and this is how he continues throughout the portfolio as well is where he has this left-hand side column he has a middle column and then he has a larger space and that continues throughout the project but as a whole would you want this project in a portfolio where you can't uh maybe see what is in it like doesn't matter like i said when we had a last interview there's two readings for the portfolio one is incredibly fast and i'm i'm skipping through so i know she has 22 pages i'm going to see 22 pages in six seconds and i'm gonna pick what catches my attention so first i see the 22 pages in six seconds and i get an overview of the quality of graphic design type of drawings you know what is their 3d capabilities what is their illustrator diagram capabilities in those six seconds and the organization skills because i'm going to be able to see the layout very quickly if in that first view i'm like okay this is a higher than average portfolio i put it to one side and then i'll go into it in detail and when i go into in detail i'm going to try to figure out points that i would want to ask this person if i'm going to interview them and the first read if this project doesn't have the let's say the meat of the project there yet because it's ongoing or because it's too big to just put in the portfolio because it would take up you know 80 of the portfolio it's fine i'm going to be skipping over to the next project until i see something i want to go into in detail however this is very uh let's say academic work it seems like it's a lot of research and it's very urban and it's very small diagrams however if this had been an architecture project and it's a section and a rendering of a project that i'm really interested in and then i don't see any more information then i'm considering lacking and i'm saying where's the project i only see two images you know so it can be a double-edged sword in that sense but because this is a thesis project it's very academic and research wise and it and as you say it's ongoing for me it was fine as a first project all right so let's move on to the next page okay revive again here everything's so small scaled you know you'd like to think as a designer that people are going to be very interested in your projects and they're going to go into the finer details of things you need to think that people are going to look at your portfolio in full screen format they're going to zoom in once in 100 views and at the bottom scale i can see all the diagrams of you know thinking at an urban scale from the macro down to the micro and these diagrams that are processing different programs different considerations of the site that eventually start developing these generic volumes uh expressing these section diagrams so in that sense i understand a process of way of thinking in the support for in this project i don't get all the program because i don't go in to read it but the layout again is very successful and you can see that there's a method of how to work a project now if you go to the next page then it goes straight into the plan right yeah uh and here i don't care about the design because i'm not talking to the person it's not being explained to me that very straightforward because the previous image was too small scale very dramatic sort of little boxes and now immediately the design is done so now i'm here i'm judging more based on okay how does this person draw a plan right and it's about plot styles and it's about uh quality of line weights and these kind of things the plan in this section together with a couple of um perspectives started to give me the the inner workings of the project and how it the look and feel for it a little bit right so in that sense i appreciate the circulations and the sections um the graphic design selection of yellow is being continued in a kind of very uh smart way also he's chosen not to use colors highlighting the yellow and keeping the the perspective in white and that plays really well with a plan i wish i could have a bigger section more filled in with activity to really understand how the section is working however i'm judging here the plan as in can you draw a good plan here here is one of the questions that i wanted to put up to you as we're discussing as well is when you say in the last uh in the last page we were seeing you know his initial process of how he was coming on to things and then here we see a large size of the final plan and it's here we we have to think of a limit of the number of pages that we're putting up in the portfolio as well so what i wanted to ask you was what should be an ideal portfolio length you can't you can't do that um because let me tell you it's it's very difficult to narrow it down to a page number because sometimes depending on the graphic design you can stream through 60 pages in a few seconds very easily or if it's a very heavily overcrowded design you know 20 pages might feel like a year so it's hard to say that that's why i said the beginning the number of projects that i can i feel more comfortable in saying i would not show more than six projects i think actually five is even pushing it so absolute maximum is six anything else more than six it's craziness you should be able to show actually your design prowess let's say your capabilities of a designer in three projects and then after that perhaps just show a couple of good drawing techniques and representation techniques let's say construction documents detailing or renderings technical skills so what is your design and showing your designs and the other is showing your technical capabilities so i would feel comfortable and giving a maximum number of projects six ideally three page numbers that's really hard because it has to do with the layout and the graphic design uh let's move on to his next project which is emergence this is interesting because this project for me what i understand is their abilities to design uh in maya or you know i'm not very capable in these sort of like very advanced advanced parametric patrick schumacher uh grasshopper maya blender skills uh i can i appreciate them and i know how to deploy them when we need them i know when they're required let's say and then i can get somebody in the team to help me out with these things but i don't know them by hand however i can see them and appreciate them and i understand also why this becomes a very dark project and there's a black background so for me this project uh i know she's showing off his capabilities in this uh let's say realm and this software however the section drawings are hand-drawn so it's an interesting mix of these things yeah i still stand by that i do not prefer black backgrounds okay again the design don't really understand what it's all about from these images however the most important thing in this project for me is the use of this software and the only thing i can recognize the software is a small image on the left which in the next in the next uh slides pages 11 and 12 we can start seeing the exploration of this software and of course in 13 and 14 we see where it ends up however i wish that that image was a little bit more predominant at the beginning instead of these small axos and sections as you stress on that point that it sort of pains your eye to look at the black background and i was just switching back and forth from the page before and coming back to this one and it really does i mean when you're going through it it really does strain your eye and when you just see all this black at one time as you say again uh i used to use grasshopper but i haven't that was it and i haven't used it for a while the first page for me was fairly easy to understand because i think it was if you read through the whole thing he sort of explained everything as well so i think that was nice the second page where he does his explorations is where uh he does catch my eye with what he's doing but he loses me on a on a ideological level because i don't understand what is happening and why but coming to the last page of this project i don't particularly like this one as a page as a composition of this uh the whole thing it it's a break away from what he was doing till now like till now i when i was looking at his projects and looking at the portfolio everything seemed very well organized everything seemed the colors sort of were chosen very specifically and everything was making sense here it feels like a like all of these images just have been put together again he has tried on a few grids but this is feel it put together two things there uh uh we don't you you mentioned you didn't understand it ideologued at an ideological level and let me tell you most of the people are gonna be hiring you so i'm speaking from the hiring perspective we don't care about the ideology we wanna we wanna see what you're capable of not necessarily what you're thinking we wanna so again i'm speaking from a small design-oriented studio you come here and we teach you how to think very rarely will you go into a studio and to teach the studio how to think you know it's the other way around however we want to know what you're capable of and this project it shows like you're trying just to show off your capability in these programs if you want me hire if you want to hire me for these things just bear in mind i can do it you know that's that's what i'm reading uh because it's a classic example that if you have a hammer then every problem isn't it looks like a nail right and so in this sense yes perhaps this mix used uh project which does which doesn't look like a mixed use project you had to design it with the software and it's like okay well let's just design the most kind of zaha ish parametric way for that sake not because that's what's required do you know what i mean yeah so successful in showing off the skills let's now move on to uh page 25 mars one yeah all right first impressions about this project uh i'd like to know okay so first impression uh very sort of psi arc image um i'm impressed by the image i know nothing about the project except it's a collection of like pixelized volumes you know this for me as a studio it's not a project i'm gonna focus on uh because it might look like a shiny project and mars one competition great to do competitions uh it might sound like a great name but particularly on my side on the hiring side not particularly interested in this project i know that might sound surprising speaking of being on the hiring side when we talk about portfolios versus personal interview our portfolio is just sort of gateway to that personal interview which would finally decide things or uh how much percentage do you think each of them holds in the hiring process oh i would say 80 is your portfolio for you to be able to get the interview and then in the interview you need to have a really bad interview to not get hired you're very close to getting hiring uh getting hired sorry or perhaps if there were several candidates you were just not the best one it doesn't mean that your interview was bad it was just you're not the best one for the position maybe also you had some requirements during the interview process that others didn't have like for example visa status or expected salary maybe you were under qualified or overqualified you had a really good portfolio but they're looking for a project leader and you've never led a project so they don't want to make that jump the key to getting the interview is your portfolio from your interview to getting hired it's a small jump you're very close i wanted to come to the next one which is on page number 29 which is reconnect and the reason i wanted to come to this one and discuss this one is it is uh be all the portfolios that i went through for shortlisting for this video one of the reasons that i chose the three projects were because of because i really like their presentation skills and i really love how their portfolio the final output came out i didn't again as you said uh going the pile of watching it in six seconds and seeing whether you like it or not that is that is to be honest exactly what i did with the portfolios i scrolled through them but this page is sort of reminiscent it's sort of a better uh representation of what i saw in most of the portfolios where a lot of information was scrammed in pages is a lot of things coming together here here and and i shouldn't be able to talk about this because my portfolio was exactly the same and things were just crammed into the video i've seen that video of your portfolio yes i saw these portfolios and i was like i should just take down that video before uploading any episodes of this series like why am i even talking about this but again i don't work sorry i shifted my camera yeah but again i don't work as an architect on my portfolio is my youtube page now yeah but uh what are your thoughts on this this is a common problem and we're going to touch upon this in the other portfolios as well this is not the only project or the only portfolio that does this and again this comes back to the first thing i said uh the ability to downsize to compress to identify what's the most important image here one way to tackle it is to put everything in the project there boom and that's what happens another way to tackle it is like okay i'll do one page which has all the process stuff i'm not going to explain it you're just going to be able to see it so you know that i do have a process there was a process and that's the evidence that's like at the beginning i can't remember what page page it was but the figures that had no text and you said look they're not explaining what they're doing i'm like yeah i don't care i just like that it's there you know because it's like the evidence but it cannot all be like that that's considering that there's one page which has process and there's the other page which has the outcome and you hope that one page the other connects enough in the observer's brain to put together the project in their head that should be enough uh so yeah this is a common problem and i think also the rendering skills and this one are very different i think it's a different software that was used uh versus the other projects so the next couple of slides the only thing that i wanted to discuss was the fact that the format that he had established right at the start of the portfolio is now gone at these end pages and also i wanted to understand how much do last few pages where you are maybe exploring sketches and photography and other skills uh how much does that matter in your final assessment of the folio uh it's appreciated i don't think it matters if it's not there it's not like you won't get a call uh and if it's there it's not going to make a difference but it it it's like having that photo at the beginning to see a phase it's getting to know the applicant a little bit better so it's appreciative in this case the format being broken i don't mind too much had there been a cover in a cover uh page to introduce these topics that didn't happen i don't know of the person that was crafting this portfolio andrew i know you're sorry anush yep if they had a limit in pages in mind for x or y reason uh but if you introduce a cover page then you can break the layout because you're talking about something different so everything within this new chapter should be or can be in a new format but without the cover page it's a little bit confusing all right so we've sort of come to the end of the portfolio before we move on to the next one uh i wanted your inputs on the following so we have this in the format we have scores on different areas of the portfolio so let's go through one of them and let's go through all of them the first one is first impression so on a scale of one to ten first impressions what would you score eight and that for me is a very high grade all right uh aesthetics and compositions uh unfortunately because of black backgrounds that's going to go put to a 7.5 ease of understanding i'm going to give an 8 again uh length of the folio it was a little bit long so in that sense a 7. perfect now just before we move on to the next portfolio um any tips that you would have for his folio well i would go to the initial uh comments um add social media shorten it try to avoid black backgrounds cover pages and perhaps be very strategic when you do your page layouts per project so you say okay first page has a format and i show process and one striking image striking image is really important and then the next one always plan and section and axo in the same locations it seems that in this case every project follows a layout but the images are wherever they want to be you know sometimes it's a model sometimes it's a a section sometimes an actual perspective they're all over the place it's very appreciative when there is a very straightforward aggressive format followed it's very much appreciated for the eyes on the on the observer side so that was the end of another's portfolio let's move on to our second portfolio which is uh our mia's portfolio i have to say i loved this portfolio i saw it it was initially i i just saw it and in the first impression of like yes this has to be discussed i mean uh a sensibility comes across mia is clearly very artistically inclined i sense that she's a sensitive person she has amazing graphic design skills and representation skills from the physical model making to the let's say what would be almost like a magazine or art quality level illustration so really fantastic work let's go over to her cover page so this is the cover page that you were talking about where she has made a composition of different buildings so you're saying you didn't appreciate this as much yes and so i don't know all those buildings so i don't know why they're there my recommendation put your name on the portfolio cover and that's it don't put images having said that again format even though this is the portfolio i love the most this is the least successful format because this is into portrait pages put together however to be able to see both of them side to side i have to go into the adobe pdf and i know that this this wasn't an issue on on the web right yeah okay uh here's an important note offices don't like getting links to issues we want to have the file stored in our human resources uh folder with your name and the date when you apply so we can organize our applicants we cannot organize applicants with links that's because you would have to have a word document with all the links to and then they get broken we want a file and that's why most studio pages say send a pdf and it has to be between five and eight megabytes no heavier than that right the format here is problematic because it's two pages and indesign always sets the cover page separate on top so if i go into pdf and say give me two pages side by side they're they're in a bad format because the cover is there so what i i did then is i deleted the cover which i do this often for people who send me portfolios like this so bear in mind these things it's much more successful to export as a spread yes and then do a two-page spread of your cover as well yeah the word exactly that's why i said that i know just was the most successful format wise last thing about format because army is much more artistically inclined and because she has this incredible uh illustrations she appropriately has given a textured background normally i would say never do that normally i would say that will never work however she was very careful in having every single image work with that background where it was where it it was transparency or it was not and that took a lot of effort and work to make that work which is clear that it makes sense that she's skilled in graphics so let's quickly go over her contents and the cv all right so she has one two three four five five projects and the the other one is sketches even the fifth one is working drawing so i think it perfectly fits into what you were talking about that's correct uh i want to just make a point in the cv in the cv we want to be very very technical and if i'm reading the portfolio right amir is a bit more on the artistic side so that makes sense that there's some things lacking in the cv i want to see dates i want to see responsibilities and i want to see activities for your work experience so where did you work what was your position called your role the health position and what were your activities otherwise for me as a hiring person it's useless information oh i worked at oma okay what did you do while you were may you worked as what and how long were you there for the year is not enough i want a month in and a month out so a bit more detail in that so uh let's move on to the next one here we can see the cover page that you were talking about or the project however there's a problem okay digitally this makes sense had the portfolio being exported in a spread that means two pages put together in one single image yeah it's not i fixed it so i can see both them together and not one like that but i see the line of the page break yeah otherwise great a little bit of information one image that sort of summarizes a project loving it all right let's move on to the next one all right so this was the very one of the very first things that caught my eye in this project when if as you said that six second flip through this is one of the first things that you would see and it it made me stop and look at the portfolio yeah absolutely no and this is why sometimes page numbers are a luxury because you can do stuff like this and you need to take advantage of this so when you're flipping through this you know we've got double the pages more or less than whatever uh anush had and it doesn't feel that much longer and it's less projects you know so that's why page numbers are so variable so here armia does something very good she does a cover image which uh it's like a palette cleanser you know in a restaurant at a high-end restaurant when you're going from one dish to another they come with a little sorbet so you can clean your pallet so you can properly taste the next dish that's what the cover image does and then after this palette cleanser from going from the cv to the first project with a little icon not an icon a little image with the summer image and a brief description of the most important data then she hits you with the most powerful image of the project which is a compelling beautiful illustration and then once you get like hit with a hammer over the head with this image then she goes the next pages to explain it with a couple of plans and a couple of diagrams so it's a great format that she's establishing for all the projects she's clearly a very skilled person not only graphically but in storytelling she knows how to go about explaining a project again same moving on to the next page as well i really love the color choices the color combination that she's put up in her own portfolio uh even as you move from this page to the next one the complementing the reds of the last page you move on to this one you have a a blue which which perfectly complements the red so i i really appreciate the color composition and the color palette that she's chosen very graphically skilled uh the mixing of 3d uh and and flat imaging with illustration techniques is very successful i want to congratulate aramia for winning this competition i hope there was a nice price to it and i can understand why it won design wise i read into it a little bit there's these pause moments where she abstracts the dwelling into these smaller pods so the pods become the interior within the exterior which is encapsulated so they play between inside outside activity and non-activity in a pod around the pandemic was really interesting so congratulate me on that perfect let's move on to the next uh project which is the spiritual center so this is her semester six yeah i want to say something about these cover uh pages i think yeah like i've said before they're very important i know that she's much more artistically inclined and doesn't want to clutter things but i would appreciate a little bit more information in these covers so what i would like to see she's already put in title spiritual center year 2019 that's great it says semester six so i know it's an academic project and who the mentor was you could put there a little bit more info as to the program like square meters and if it was individual or not so still missing a few i know that sounds very technical but i'm sorry i want to know if this was a project by herself or in collaboration i'm assuming by the graphics that it was her own but you never know this could have been a collab project that then she then fixed all the images for herself so again the four minutes followed through cover powerful images then goes into details beautiful plans uh brief descriptions really beautiful events yes and some some images that almost look like a cartoon i this looks like if i was watching tv in these little perspectives where the play of light is very carefully placed now i understand why the plans are so small because it's this artistic sensibility to make it look like a little icon but i would have appreciated larger plans i know they're not detailed i know they're just zoning um but for me they're a little bit small as information wise again beautiful axo with the roofs lifted so you can see the interior dividing walls beautifully illustrated it's a beautiful project all right uh so we'll just skip the next one which is the school that was my favorite all right let's let's discuss it then uh i see the model here and i actually wanted to read the description for this and again it was about yes the triangle and the folding and the space but there was a thinking about the the the user the inhabitant which are kids at school uh so i was really mesmerized by the physical model of this and the treatment of the the the ground the sand and the sections were beautiful so i had seen the previous planet axo in the in the previous project then i'm missing a plan i'm i'm really kind of dissatisfied that there is no plan in this in this project so that's what i wanted to say about this and i think this is my favorite project of the portfolio like you can really in within this you can really see her model making skills and even the model she's blended really well with uh like overlaying it with the collage of the students in the in the main image and even here where she's removed everything from in between the trees to match with her textured background so all of it i think really detailed and loads of efforts gone into this you can see i mean it's it's gorgeous it's everything in this portfolio is gorgeous and i mean coming on to her pages page about sketches seeing her own portfolio i don't think she even needed to put this here we knew how beautifully she can do things and i think this goes on to about your last where you said that it's just appreciated and you can just see some more beautiful things that she can do but i would say this portfolio went about much faster uh then i know this portfolio even though it's literally almost double the number of pages it still went about much faster yes and i would say that uh if she's gonna keep these images of the background like i said they're appreciated they're not required i would only eliminate the black and white sketches because it's the only place where she breaks the norm and her image has a background which blocks the the the texture that she's used in the background so careful with that the images of the food and the shoes are beautiful again i want to congratulate army uh she has fantastic design and graphic uh skills all right so let's quickly go over our uh points and let's look at what you score her talking about first impressions uh i would give a nine which is a very high grade uh aesthetics and compositions 9.5 beautiful yeah i think this portfolio really deserved that ease of understanding only because of the format problems which she had which is the technicality and because it's heavy i mean megabytes wise i'm gonna give it a nine otherwise it would be a better grade all right and the length of the folio that's a good nine perfect so an advice that you would give to amir for her portfolio yeah so again armenia portfolio is uh what as like rem once told me is horrendously beautiful yes it's like amazing so the only thing i would say is the cv part lacks a bit more detail i think i mentioned that lengthwise is perfect uh illustrations are beyond perfect but i would like to have seen a little bit more in like hardcore plans the plans all seem like cartoons and that's great but you know for depending where you're applying a large mixed-use development project of a developer can present them a cartoon with a plan they needed like a very hardcore serious plan so maybe in the part of technical drawings introduce some of those that would be appreciated and again the cover was missing when you go from projects to technical drawings and additional work so that would be my small bits of advice uh compress layers the the portfolio is too heavy as a file and fix that layout issue yeah exporting spreads not in single pages so you get first the cover and then all the spreads and if you want to be sale fail proof your cover should be a spread as well don't include pictures of architecture or a collage of architecture in your cover just include your name the work inside your portfolio will speak for itself all right so let's move on to our third portfolio for the day this girl did not want her name to be out and so i was thinking we could have called her something else and as i was watching harry potter all day today and i was watching bellatrix's videos we're gonna just call her bellatrix and bella in short do you have you seen i mean are you a harry potter fan i have never seen a harry potter i've never seen it i'm more than viviana i don't think we can do this again right let's get back to bella all right so bella's portfolio let's talk about the cover page first what are your thoughts okay so i'm assuming this is a drawing of hers because she mentions that she's in in paris but at least i'm thinking it's her drawing and the reason for that is that because after that i see that instead of putting a photo over hers she put an illustration of hers which is fantastic i mean that's amazing because it's very well done so i appreciate that i prefer still a photo but i appreciate it and i see a very well organized index of the work she lists her competitions which is great to see workshops and other stuff and education-wise so starting off great uh well organized and the format is good it's a landscape format it covers most of my screen it's not the most successful format again that was announces but it works now moving on to content here's the first problem with this portfolio way too much stuff how many are there one two three four five six seven eight nine the nine projects and then there's other works exactly and in other words there could be small projects in there that are just shown for representation but it's way too much stuff yeah uh you remember the movie jerry maguire uh where she says you had me at hello by the third project you should have your person who's reviewing the portfolio interested in if not they're not going to be interested no matter if it's 20 projects don't expect them to be interested by the last project because you're going to start off also with the strongest stuff that you have not end with the strongest stuff that you have this is very important sometimes people there's different ways of organizing your work sometimes people want to see a progression chronologically and start off with first semester then fourth semester and then final project at the end that is a way to do it but you can then it's risky that the person that reviewing your portfolio can be put off by the first couple of pages and say no this is not what we want careful with that i suggest starting strong strongest stuff you have first if it can be organized chronologically great but back here to bella too much stuff and if we go into the projects the too much stuff continues in this now i have to say beautifully illustrated beautifully i mean really bella can be a very successful graphic design artist by her drawing skills however again it's too much information crammed into a page and what happens is that each drawing gets small and then it gets cluttered and then i just glance over and say oh beautiful images uh seems like there's things being thought through and worked out i'm gonna skip to the next page i'm not gonna zoom in yeah and that's what happens exactly i that is what i'm looking at i mean they're all beautiful then they all look good individually they're amazing sketches but i think again as we move on to the first project only which is the end of french 2019 and we sort of see all these sketches together and i think it makes the page a little bit crowded and you might not want to zoom in and look at everything because it will take a lot of your time to just go through everything here as well moving on to the next project the cover page is greatly appreciated it lays out the required information and it shows a beautifully nice done collage it's more or less the same technique that amelia yes that she followed but she put it in the center which didn't work with the spine but we can fix that so it's the same technique and it's guys do this this is great okay yeah i was about to say like visually it's really nice yeah it's beautiful then we're going to the project because it's an urban scale there's a lot of urban plants which urban plants you know look uh complex and when you scale them down they're hard to understand but it's an urban project that's how they work and it goes in the next page to more urban analysis and then there's some section elevations which are very well illustrated however i don't quite understand what the project is because i don't know if that was a building that was refurbished or if that was the design of the building or if it was an analysis of the building and honestly i didn't going to read the text and i'm not going to i'm going to skip to the next project because up until now what i can see is great graphic design skills and a little bit cluttered so i'm trying to look for a project now where i'm interested to go in and to see design skills for this one i uh one thing that i really really really love and appreciate is is the fact that every project has this again in it's not just a whole image but i it it's somehow a smaller image that comes up for a project and sort of like an icon for that project and i love how how she writes the numbers with it's the smaller things that that really make it for me the the three written with manga in the next project yes the graphic design but however here now i'm missing the cover page i understand that this page functions as a camera page but it's too cluttered with stuff it has a plan the cover page should be palette cleansing again it's a little sorbet to understand you're going from one project to another it can have a project image but it should be small and it should uh leave a question mark open which means it interests you to try to figure out what is this party about so you go into the next pages but it doesn't give it all away a plan definitely gives a project all away because it's telling you exactly how it works yeah having said that this is my favorite project from this portfolio the the mango however i have some issues with it not design wise i really appreciate the little icons on top which illustrate problems or consideration considerations of the site which then the project tackles however one of my pet peeves uh first of all repeated plans never do that never repeat the same image or similar images and the other one is renderings with skewed verticals guys always correct the verticals now moving on to the next project uh roti again i don't want to repeat stuff that we've already mentioned but i want to highlight something that she knows how to use yes and that's the color white if we look at page 21 the hand-drawn drawings that are on overlaid on this sort of cream beige color yeah know how to use white and this is very important that's why when i said white background or light colored backgrounds or like a light gray or light beige is very important because then you have the ability to use white when you have a white background you can never use white because it disappears so here she really emphasizes that she knows the power of white and these little hand on drawings yeah so that's very successful in this project yeah again but uh the page is a bit busy very cl cluttered too much stuff going on so the ability to compress minimal identify the strongest and what communicates the project and its process the clearest and fastest way with the least amount of drawings all right let's uh go on to the next project which is the ris h2o bravo if i'm reading that right yes this project i have issues with the documentation of this so page 25 where she goes into this project pretty much seems that it's in keeping with their skills and graphic design that is laid out for the whole portfolio but if we go to page 27 which is the next page uh again here we have two pages yeah numbered for one spread yeah so it's okay these are renderings done in a different software with different technique this is lumion if i'm not wrong this is lumion the sky is very identifiable it looks like it but also she immediately broke the format if you're looking this at full screen and you're skipping through like you would in the first round also the images go like this and they're in the center which is really unsettling and they correspond to a completely different technique the views of the camera angles are all skewed i don't like these images at all i would take out this project if you don't have images that coincide with the rest of your portfolio just as a publication in itself as like a one whole unit thing it looks like something different and so these are her other works and uh what are your thoughts here uh yes well first of all uh there's a page page 45 has an interesting hand-drawn uh element there which might need to be blurred on youtube i'm not quite sure uh however i do think that she needs to explain a little bit more what was going on in the next page because i don't know if that was a research project or was it just her traveling it seems like it's a cover of a magazine there was she doing photograph for a magazine perhaps it's something i need to go back and check in her cv and it's in between two pages of illustrations so forty five is illustrations and forty nine is again art art and illustrations so it seems to me like like this topic number ten or index page number 10 is a little bit messy and like in the end just a whole bunch of stuff went in so i would reorganize this and remember it's appreciated but it's not necessary and overall the portfolio is too long yeah i would take out the interior design and i would take out rizza bro if you don't have uh illustrations instead of those renderings immediately just to shorten it a little bit but it should be shortened a lot more still all right so let's quickly go over the scores that you would give bella so first impressions okay first impression is a solvent 8.5 uh i can see strong graphic design skills all right aesthetics and compositions another 8.5 ease of understanding that because the images are way too small and because she breaks format several times once with the cover pages and then with the changing of from drawings to renderings and the length some some projects have multiple pages some don't i would say it's an 8.0 and length of the folio again it's in i i'm tempted to give seven point something but i'm going to say 8.0 so an advice for the portfolio my advice for for bella and her portfolio is to immediately shorten it and to introduce the cover files uh for each project and organize the additional work if you keep it again it's not required if you do those three things you're going to end up with a much more compact concise and stronger portfolio don't think that more is better less is more this applies here all right okay so uh now that we've come towards the end of this video do i need to ask which your favorite portfolio was out of all three i think both of us was the same it was us that we really loved and beautifully made portfolio army not that anujis or bella's was not beautifully made but i mean if you're just looking at all three i think uh mia's is the one that really shines all three are really good but hers was above above and beyond like you would would you call her for an interview after this yeah i would love to but i don't know if i would love to because i think she would be a person she reminds me of uh um a next student of mine that interned and worked for us as a junior architect for two years almost laura ductinite she's from lithuania and the reason why i asked her to come and collaborate with us was because she would push conceptual thinking and graphic design skills on the sensitive artistic side so i think wherever she goes she would be a great element to help push a team to always take care for this artistic side and these artistic sensibilities that's why i would hire her i would hire her to push my team to not be so damn square in engineering all the time and think about the softer side and more intricate and more uh subtle sensibilities perfect all right vivian thank you so much for taking out the time for this uh it was lovely having you and you had some great insight like throughout the discussions as well i hope it's it's helpful actually because when you asked me to uh provide you with my products i had to go digging into them the whole topic of portfolios came up and so i actually i'm teaching a course on portfolios this december break 23 people signed up in one day and a half like the tickets flew so i'm probably gonna do uh one in english so it's a one-on-one i was about to ask is it in english yeah five weeks i think it's eight sessions in five weeks it's saturdays and and mondays so people who listen this if this is uploaded in time pay attention to my social media i'll post it and you guys can can uh participate also you can send me the link i'll put down the description below as well so people can go and check it out and that was it you guys now i won't make this outro long because i know you've been watching for an hour so i'll just quickly get on with things okay first things first i want to thank all three people anuj army and bella for providing their portfolios and as a thank you for letting me use them and letting me showcase them i'm giving you access to all of my bonus patreon videos that i've made till now so you can go and check out all of the content that i've made and that content includes the portfolios that viviano made for both oma and for getting into psych so you can go and check that out also if you want to send in your portfolios for the next episode of portfolio review you can do so at ba portfolio review gmail.com also if you would like to support this channel or would just like to see some bonus videos including the bonus footage from this video this video was actually two hour long i edited it down to one hour so we have a lot more content i'm gonna put it up on patreon if you wanna access that you can become a patron the link will be down below and yeah that is it don't forget to like to share and to subscribe to bless dark i will see you guys very soon with more content but one more thing sorry that is why many times you send your portfolio and you don't get an email or a call back it's because that's the jump you're gonna get you're gonna send a lot of portfolios you're gonna see the portfolio many times but very seldomly will you get asked for an interview

Channel: BlessedArch

Views: 30,548

Rating: 4.9835391 out of 5

Keywords: portfolio, architecture portfolio, portfolio review, architecture portfolio review, portfolio tips, how to make a portfolio, best portfolio, ux portfolio, user experience, blessed arch, rem koolhaas, oma architecture, working at oma, oma portfolio, ted talks architecture, design tutorial, graphic design, how to design, diy design, how to portfolio, how to make the best portfolio, what to include in your portfolio, architect portfolio, critique, interior design portfolio

Id: ZDgYamCG9Pc

Length: 59min 22sec (3562 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020