Process of crafting your first Architectural Portfolio
Posted on : May 22, 2020
In our ongoing series of articles on Architectural portfolio we intend to help aspiring architects while they work on their professionally crafted portfolio as the part of either job application or pitching for a project to a potential client. Under this article we would like to take you through the stages or steps of preparing an architectural portfolio.
Step 1: Selection of the project or projects
While crafting your architectural portfolio one should be careful in selecting his / her most recent and relevant project(s), which could represent the way one thinks about an architectural design and is able to showcase the relevant skills, demonstrate architectural capabilities and an exposure to number of construction stages.
Step 2: Selection of Pictures / Renders / Sketches / Images under selected project
One of the key points to note is to maintain diversity in selection of media while presenting your work over and above the actual work like drawings or sketches itself. It not only demonstrates your skills level but also makes the overall portfolio interesting and engaging. Secondly one should always eye for quality over quantity while selecting the images.
Tip. – Use a professional quality scanner to scan your hand drawings to include in your portfolio
Step 3: Selection of an appropriate format
Ideally we suggest one should represent its work in more comfortable A3 size sheets, which would be easier to either scale up or scale down without losing the details and would be easier to get printed. Many a time’s recruiting team or the potential client would ask for a soft copy of your portfolio in an email as the part of short listing process. In such cases professionally scanned A3 sheets are handy and could be shared easily.
Step 4: Set a standard layout for the portfolio
One of the critical things while crafting an architecture portfolio is to set a standard tone of presenting your work which ultimately triggers consistency and a systematic flow in the viewer’s mind while he / she go through it.
Step 5: Enhance your portfolio’s visual appeal
Last and one of the most critical steps is to enhance your portfolio’s overall visual appeal, ideally it should run in some pattern or chronology and be able to systematically demonstrate one’s architectural capabilities. Also, one of the critical stages under this step is creation of an attractive cover and back page which should be engaging enough for a viewer to follow your story page by page.