This video overview of what goes into a printed textile design portfolio demonstrates and explains the essentials thoughts to consider when going on an interview.
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[00:00] Hi and welcome back to part two. Thanks for watching what goes into a portfolio here. I'm sharing the printed and the tablet version. If you want to see my e online versions, go to part one and also learn about the templates and the 10 step checklist and the mini course. That are all free on my website and grab the links below.
[00:23] Okay. So this is the printed portfolio and I like to keep my resume in here. Um, it happens a lot of times that people don't have your resume on hand and they forget why they invited you in here and it's nice to point out. Yeah. Okay. Here, this the resume you already saw. So let's talk about why you brought me in. All right, so this is the portfolio that I put together for a specific textile design job that I went in for. And I knew that this company was big on birds, owls and such things. So I looked through my work and um, I like to, in my portfolio that's printed, I kind of liked to be in charge of the conversation, kind of like rehearse what I'm going to say and start with a show stopper in my opinion. This is some of my better work and then I have a strong beginning, strong middle and end and also plan the story of my skills throughout what I do.
[01:27] These layouts are done in Illustrator, so this is something that you can easily set up yourself. But I kind of just have a two page layout. I like to keep things to two pages when it comes to my textile design. Um, sometimes that's not necessarily possible when you show your inspiration and then some other things in fashion design. But regardless, the template that I have for you guys on my website can work for that and you can just make it longer or just repeat it. I like when I print out things, how I can take these little pages out and rearrange things. And also just before I even put it into the sleeves here, I plan it out pretty well. And um, so once again I like doing this from within Illustrator, but this could also work from Photoshop. Now here, like I said, there are some stories for me to communicate with a qualified interviewer.
[02:26] So for example, if it's H&R and I'm talking about textile design they might not be so interested in this, but if it is a textile designer that's interviewing me and we were talking about layouts and mirrored and diamond prints and drop and all that stuff. It makes for good conversation. Okay. Here on once again, just a little bit of the finished product. Then my design right here. Another layout here, where I change it up is I'm showing different color ways. Starting a little bit of the technical information here. With the Pantone call outs, this one right here. Specifically planed to kind of. This is. And layout right here of a print where I really wanted to talk about the story of my interaction and communication skills with the customer, which were that they requested a watercolor print in illustrator.
[03:18] For those of you who don't know, for those of you who know and want a little chuckle, I think it's funny when people request a watercolor of a vector file because it's a huge pain in the ass and it's such an insane amount of colors like these little leaves right here. I'm going into my lecture mode, sorry, but I'm just pretty much. I told the customer, Hey, this is what we can do. It's just going to be so many colors. You're not going to be able to afford printing this. If we reduce it down to this color, this is the look it's going to be, are you okay with it? And they actually were and we were able to create something somewhat looking like the inspiration in five colors right here. Here's another planned story element, which was I was informed that this particular company does a lot of owls.
[04:08] I happen to have designed some owls. On one of these owls on one of these owls was the only one that got produced, but the other one was one of my, I guess now it's clip art. I can reuse it whenever I want to, but the story here is also that this was created on the Ipad. And it's also just showing off my skills and that I'm versatile and continuing with the versatility of myself because it's like you're selling yourself, right? So I also show some hand sketches, so showing how my hand sketch translates into vector art and the final print. Here, another conversation piece, which is a little bit more complicated, is how to create a mock up. How the vector border print needed to be converted from illustrator into a glitter print. And that was a lot of fun. And actually, um, it was remarked that they've seen glitter prints done pretty ugly and that they liked how it looked.
[05:16] So there, that was good. Here, once again, just kind of something I wanted to show was just that my lingerie beginnings really showed me how much I love print design and my humble beginnings as a textile designer here. And in addition to that, um, this would be an embroidery design, which once again I had the information up front that that's something they wanted to have as a skill. So not every textile design job is going to ask for everything. So this is very specific to here and also some of this little art right here. It's just funny to me because that's the inspiration I was given and then that's how it resulted in the design. And sometimes I have to make a choice between, oh this is very pixelated, but that's the only thing I have. Am I going to include this in my portfolio to tell the stories, the story more important and is the story gonna outweighed how ugly this is.
[06:17] So for me, I thought it was. And some of these, there wasn't really much of a translation. The inspiration was very much almost what ended up. And then here I'm just another extra section, here, something where thankfully while I worked as a colorist, I had taken some of my work and this is Nedgraphics, I don't have any of these files, but I'm always able to take some of my old clippings and mounted it and make it somewhat look as if it all came from the same source, which is Illustrator. So here you can see how do you. Sorry, just colorizations of the same print and here I go a little bit more to like, look, even if you asked me to do 100, I'll gladly do it for you over and over and over again. Yeah. And just kind of across the different styles that could be required.
[07:16] And that's it for my printed one. Here is the portfolio on a tablet. This happens to be an iPad and in essence it's exactly the same that is in my online portfolio. It's the templates that I'm using from Photoshop and um, this is what I have available for you guys. I had to put it all into one album that I named portfolio. I had it kind of opened before I went into any sort of interview so that I can just show it and um, honesty, so sort of like a backup if I feel like I want to have more to talk about and I also have to kind of get a feel for the person that's interviewing, whether it feels that they even are interested in seeing those, I think iPad in an interview are kind of tricky. Sometimes the ipad doesn't come out of the purse. Um, but it's also, I really personally liked this. I'm going to just show what I like most about it. It's this slide show that's built into this. So I'm going to just shut up and let this play.
[09:12] So these, uh, build in options, I didn't have to animate anything. There's themes in here that you can pick from music. You can have it loop and I think the icon. So super cute from slow to fast. What I find important is that when I know I'm going to an interview where they requested beforehand to see your portfolio before they even invite you. So they requested a link to an online portfolio that when I come in that I have both the old work just in case they have some questions about what they've already seen and also a lot of new work or different details of the work that they've already seen. If this video inspired you, gave you something to new to think about, it taught you any tips, let me know in the comments, subscribe, like and hit the bell. Okay?