Course Leader: Barney Townsend
What is a portfolio and what are our admissions tutors looking for in it?
The design portfolio is a graphical summary of your relevant experience and skills. At LSBU, we are far more interested in the process rather than the final outcome of any project. From a disciplinary perspective, is this how the student approaches 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.
What to not include:
Please do not just submit your final A-Level project. If you would like to include it as part of your portfolio, we suggest you rework versions of your A-level project pages by compiling the imagery into collages, and support these with briefs and bullet point annotations in the text, designed specifically to signpost the key skills for our attention.
Important tips for your portfolio:
- Make sure you’re presenting the composition of your pages.
- Stay consistent, do not use more than 3 or 4 different layout styles throughout the portfolio.
- Avoid overly bold backgrounds colours and busy border templates.
- White space is a powerful tool on a page for control of the viewers’ attention.
- Use the sans serif font for body text, and 2 or 3 sizes to create a visual hierarchy.
- Import hand sketches from either photos or scans, and adjust 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 images are all high-resolution, not pixellated, and where photos are included, crop them and align the edges into a consistent grid. And of course, credit any images included which are not the students’ original work.