Portfolio Surgery

As a way to get us use to interviews and meeting people from industries the university had set up portfolio surgeries with companies which included  The Chase, Creative Lynx, The Designers Republic, Glorious, Music and Topman to name some. My portfolio surgery was with Craig Oldham from Music. It was a great opportunity to get feedback about the way we present ourselves and our portfolios. The initial approach was to be made by us by e-mail with a sample of our work.

The whole day kinda started out bad as I turned up at the wrong place! *Panic mode* (Nightmare!! ) But to work in my favour Craig was running late in his meetings which allowed me enough time to get to the place and calm down! As there was meant to be 5 of us who were going to speak to Craig I had images of people waiting for me to turn up to start...luckily this wasn't the case as there was only two of us who turned up which proved to be more helpful as there was more time for each of to talk to him and there wasn't anyone hogging the limelight. We got the feedback and help we needed. I was nervous, as you would be, but after being in the studio for 5 minutes I realised there was no need. The atmosphere was relaxed and the people were really friendly, (We even got drinks!) also the office reminded me of Ugly Betty, when she walks into the glass doors!!

We started of by talking about the initial e-mail that we had both sent to Craig, we got tips and advice on how the e-mail is the first point of contact and how the person recieving the e-mail would have made an asumption on what type of person you are just by the way you type the e-mail. For example a simple 'hello' or 'hi' shows that you are confident about yourself and shows a bit of personality, where as 'Dear' or 'To whom..' portrays a feeling that the e-mail is generic and formal. As both me and Matt had made mistakes the main advice was to check the e-mail before sending it.

After that it was straight into the portfolios and by this time I was relaxed enough to go through my folio with ease and I knew what I wanted to say. The advice given was really helpful and the main aspect that was wrong with my folio was that I had just a little too much and had to be ruthless with the choosing of what goes in.

Currently my folio looks like this:

Open publication - Free publishing - More folio

Obviously there is a lot of pages there and it does need shortening down. It just comes back to what I think and what I think is my best work. Craig did use a lot of reference to films and to treat our folio like a film. The e-mail is the trailer-a quick insight into the work, the start of the film always grabs the attention and grips the viewers- put the best work first, with the middle being the informative area- the less meaty projects and then has a big finish- have a meaty project at the end or have an ongoing project which allows more conversation and makes the person more intrigued. (Hopefully that makes sense!)  But overall it was a really good experience and I learned a lot just from a few hours.


Check out Music Design's website: http://www.designbymusic.com/
         Also Craig Oldhams website: http://www.craigoldham.co.uk/