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Product Design Portfolio

Information about the Product Design and Technology portfolio process
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An applicant taster day will be taking place at LSBU in March, and as part of this you will be invited to show us your portfolio. This is an amazing opportunity for academics to meet you in person and see your creative process rather than a formal interview. If you are unable to attend the taster day and submit a portfolio in person, you may submit a digital portfolio if your application is successful.

Below you will find information on what to include in your portfolio. After you have read the instructions for your specific programme, please submit your documents to admissions@lsbu.ac.uk (quoting your UCAS ID in the subject line).

Submitting your portfolio

We will be doing portfolio sessions as part of the applicant taster days but if you are unable to attend these, then we can accept a digital submission.

We very much prefer to review a physical portfolio to a digital one. A3 is the most effective size for balancing impact and space on the pages, with portability. Buy a folder that has individual page wallets; this doesn’t need to be an expensive one – it’s just to protect the contents and keep them from getting dog-eared. This effectively compiles the contents into a series of double-page spreads, so condense each project or topic down to either 2, 4, or 6 pages, designed to be viewed as doubles. Add a contents page at the beginning, and label each project with a bullet point introduction summarising the brief (if there was one) or the intention or reasoning for including the project in the portfolio. If they can accompany the portfolio with a shoebox of small prototypes or sketch models that’s great too.

Stick to one or two fonts, and keep whichever is used for body text to a simple sans serif, but use 2 or 3 sizes to create a visual hierarchy. Import hand sketches from either photos or scans, and adjust out the contrast on grey backgrounds so the line art is properly integrated to a collage on a white background, rather than a collection of greyish rectangular photos (Powerpoint will do this through the image corrections > brightness/contrast adjustments). Make sure the images are all high-resolution, not pixellated, and where photos are included (eg of prototypes), crop them and align the edges into a consistent grid. And of course, credit any images included which are not the students’ original work.

Consider the composition of the pages to be presented. Do some research into other designers or graduate portfolios and use these for inspiration – sites like coroflot.com are very helpful for this. Sketch out a few examples of different layouts to suit different types of graphic and structure the information you want to deliver, then be consistent with using no more than 3 or 4 different layout styles throughout the portfolio. This enables a viewer to rapidly learn the communication structure and more rapidly absorb information on subsequent pages. It’s the work itself that we are interested in, not the graphics in the background, so avoid overly bold background colours and busy border templates, which will only distract from the core content of the pages. Don’t forget that white space is a powerful tool on a page for control of the viewers’ attention.

It usually takes around 2-4 weeks for an academic to review your portfolio and for admissions to let you know the outcome of your application, however, during peak application periods this may take longer.

BSc/MDes Product Design and Technology

Course Leader: Barney Townsend

Portfolio information:

At LSBU, we interview all applicants to our design courses, and we request that they bring a portfolio with them to the interview. From our perspective, this is a valuable tool by which we can rapidly get an insight into the motivation, aptitude, and skill set of a prospective student; much more so, than simply an A-Level grade or prediction. But I’m frequently asked in advance, what is exactly do we mean by a “portfolio”, and what are our admissions tutors looking for in it?

I would describe the Design Portfolio as a curated graphical summary of the breadth of their relevant experience to date, and their skills. The word “Design” in the title is emphatically the verb, rather than the noun: we are far more interested in the process, than in the final outcome of any project. From a disciplinary perspective, this is how does the student approach problem solving? Can they think creatively in response to a brief? Can they constructively critique their own ideas? Do they have empathy for users? Are they confident to explore and develop ideas through 2d concept sketches, low-resolution sketch models, proof of principle prototypes, and CAD models? And can they communicate a summary of this process graphically?

Work from other disciplines, like art, graphics, textiles, or coding, is also great to include, and it doesn’t have to be just from formal education to date; evidence of 3D design, creative, or practical activity done outside of school or college demonstrates a deeper passion for the subject. Has the student built some furniture, designed a poster for a local community event, or done any entrepreneurial activity like selling work on Etsy? Have they participated as a team member or leader in a club or other organisation? This all counts towards a rounded and interesting body of work and profile of the individual.

We see a lot of “portfolios” that are simply the complete documentation of the major A-Level project. Formal educational curricula are by definition, quite constrained in scope and the required format. A strong A-level project can have 100+ A3 pages all about one project, often composed of large amounts of handwritten prose text. Not only is there not time for us to read through all this (we will typically have 15-20 minutes to review it during the interview), but also, that only gives us the one project to look at. Students should rework versions of these A-level project pages specifically for their portfolios, compiling the imagery into collages, and support these with brief, bullet point annotations in the text, designed specifically to signpost the key skills for our attention. The cliché of “a picture says a thousand words” is well worth remembering here.

Ultimately what we are looking for, in conjunction with meeting the student themselves, is a rapid sense who they are, and what motivates them to choose to study Design at degree level. Passion is more important than polish; so long as they are committed to learning, we can help them with the rest during the next 4 years. We are always happy to offer more advice, and students are very welcome to contact me in advance of the interview if they have any questions – this gives us an early indication of how keen they are.

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