If you have a creative major in college, you are more than your transcript. While potential employers are interested in your grades, more often than not their real interests lie in reviewing your portfolio of work.
There are three main reasons why you'll want to create a portfolio of your work:
1. To introduce you and your accomplishments to prospective employers
2. To educate others about your talents, skills and achievements
3. To create and market your own brand
As you pull together sample work for your portfolio, you'll need to decide which format is right for you and your needs: a paper-based portfolio, an electronic portfolio on CD-ROM or an online portfolio.
Producing a print portfolio and presentations to attract business and get a job can be time-consuming, and you can only share them with one person at a time. It can be costly too: a nice presentation case can cost hundreds of dollars, and a set of mounted prints can be equally expensive.
If you're searching for a less-costly solution CD portfolios may be the answer, especially now that CD recorders are relatively inexpensive. It is far more cost-effective to produce, duplicate, and mail a CD-based presentation instead of a bulky print portfolio. A web-based portfolio can also reduce the need for such mailings (and the related production costs).
Whichever way you to choose to present your portfolio, keep in mind that it ought to be in a similar medium to the one you're trying to sell. If you're trying to get a job as a web designer, a web-based portfolio is better than printouts of your homepage designs. If you're trying to get a job as a graphic artist, you might make a nice print package in which to send a client a CD-based portfolio.
Majors where a portfolio would be helpful include:
Visual arts
Writing (creative or journalism)
Marketing, advertising and public relations
Website design and development
Film and television production
Video game design and production
Good luck and let us know how your portfolios are coming along!
