Student Works for Show Website

Preliminary review Feb. 15

Your Work: Select three (3) illustration or design pieces that will appear on the show website. Each image should stand alone in one layout, and work well when viewed small.

All three works should be different and they should all say something about you as an illustrator or designer. The three works you select need to be formatted as:

1. JPEG or PNG
2. RGB
3. Highest Quality, No Compression
4. 72dpi
5. Landscape format of 1024-1280 pixels in the widest dimension; but dimensions haven't been established yet, so for now get the work on Turnstile2 even as a hi-res PDF, TIFF, JPEG, or PNG and we will size it later

Your Bio: Revise your third-person biography for the show website, telling readers about you, your work, and your goals. Aim for 2-3 sentences, but if you can write more, 3-5 would work well too.

Your Headshot: This is still open: Will it be a photograph or illustration of each student?

Put your three images and also your bio (as a TXT or DOCX) on the class Turnstile_2 folder.

Participation, meeting deadlines, and following directions for this work will count toward your Show Participation points.

The Resume

Due Wed. Jan. 25. A 200-word typed biography, stating who you are, what you do, and your interests. This text "resume" will become part of the senior show's website, where your biography text tells readers who you are. See past class websites for examples.

Due Mon. Jan. 30. Students must have a 1-page print out of their resume prepared for class. This will be a "content only" resume review and the resume does not need to be designed with an identity, aesthetic, nor look & feel to promote you. This is just the resume text.

1. Include your name
2. Run spell check
3. Include relevant work experience
4. Your email address and phone number
5. Mailing address not needed
6. Logos, icons, or other "personal id" not needed for this review
7. Names of references not needed

All reading assignments below include content you must take into account and put into practice when crafting your resume. If your resume needs edits, revisions, or additions to get it up to the standards of these articles, make adjustments to it.

Read from the book Talent Is Not Enough:

• Cover letter and its length: pages 27-32
• Personalizing your application with good writing: pages 120-128

And read these tems too:

• http://aiga.org/content.cfm/resume-common-mistakes
• http://aiga.org/content.cfm/resume-writing
• http://aiga.org/content.cfm/a-word-to-the-unwise
• http://aiga.org/content.cfm/after-school-special
• http://aiga.org/content.cfm/the-first-career-stages-of-a-young-designer
• http://www.aiga.org/interior.aspx?pageid=3079&id=2759

As you build your own resume, remember:

• include a header with pertinent contact information: your name, email, maybe a phone number too, mailing address isn't needed; references aren't needed
• then list:
  
  1. university degrees earned (or to be earned); GPA is optional
  2. relevant work experience; in other words, your stint as a telemarketer may not apply here; but consider what freelance work you can include and any other "actually produced" projects, internships, etc. 
  3. if you've done work in a class that has been used on campus, such as a poster for Winthrop, this is considered either "in-house design" work, and can be couched as such, provided you mention that this was for a class, and you had client interaction; VCOM 444 for VCOM students is also usable here, and can be titled Studio 351 on your resume
  4. honors, awards related to your work; scholarships apply here too
  5. organizations, be they student or professional
  6. also consider, especially if you're an illustrator
  • exhibitions
  • commissions
  • self-published works
• use spelling/grammar check
• be concise - keep it to 1 page, a one-sheet with everything on one side
• be yourself
• be succinct
• use spelling/grammar check
• do not exaggerate
• remember that any/all social media that you put out there (across the Internet) is also subject to being reviewed, scrutinized, and assessed when it comes to people hiring you or just plain old looking at you; so be yourself there, whether it means being creative, tasteful, humorous, or having no taste; as one of our former graduates put it to me years ago, "if they can't handle the shit I put on Twitter, then I don't want to work for them anyway..." That's one way to look at it, but it may limit your options.
• use spelling/grammar check 
• use spelling/grammar check a second time

Final and overall Resume Assessment will be based on:

• hierarchy of information; layout
• spelling & grammar
• relevance and appropriateness of content
• application of assigned reading information to student's resume content
• meeting the 1-page length
• handing material in on time
• following directions

The Jan. 25 and Jan. 30 reviews are the first of many milestones for your contribution to the senior show and also the resume portion of your own professional materials.

Your Portfolio Website

All students are required to set up their own personal portfolio website, and it is part of the term's overall grade. See the syllabus for more information on pages 2 and 3 and also read this folio handout.


The website need not include everything that you’ve ever done, and it may or may not include things from your printed portfolio. For example, your website could have video, which would work better online than in your printed portfolio. Your online portfolio should have your best pieces, that showcase what you are really capable of, and what you want to do long-term as an illustrator or designer, or both.

Design Continuity
Visually, the website should have some components from the identity system used on your business cards, resume, and also your printed portfolio. Brand yourself with your identity materials, and make sure things are unified across your website portfolio, portfolio book, business cards, and resume: color, placement, fonts, hierarchy, rendering styles, etc.

Your website should have between 8-10 pieces: you can have some pieces only in your printed portfolio and perhaps some only in your website folio.

Terminology

• Content Management System (CMS): a flexible, easy way to design, layout, update, and manage your website; if you subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud, you can use Adobe Portfolio and its features as part of your existing subscription; WordPress and Squarespace are widely reputable and reliable CMSs, that offer templates where you can customize your site's layout; Squarespace has a lot of add ons, including web fonts, built-in blogging tools, and also e-commerce; The Grid is a relatively new platform, and if you want to try it out, consider signing up for an advance trial; with WordPress, you can create a free yoursite.wordpress.com address here, and you can get a custom domain name there for a small yearly fee; some Domain Name registrars and web hosts will also package WordPress into their services; if you want to host your site yourself, on your own servers WordPress.org would be the way to go; to see the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org read here
• Domain Name: students are encouraged to acquire their own custom, vanity domain, such as georgedesigns.com, with georgedesigns.com being your custom domain name; prices for domains range from Free to $10/year to $50/year and even $100/year, and students should research Domain Name Registrars to compare prices; in addition to .com and .org and .net, new top-level domains have been made available, such as .design and .pictures, but new top-level domains such as those may be expensive during their initial release, and hard to come by
• Domain Name Registrar: an organization or company that manages, sells, and reserves domain names, some Content Management Systems (CMS), such as Squarespace, will sell you their CMS, and you can also buy a domain name with them as well; Google has also begun providing domain name registration as well; other places you can get your domain name include Bluehost and 1&1, who will also host your site, although Bluehost and 1&1 may only have WordPress CMS tools available
• Email: students have customarily gotten their own custom domain name, and custom email, all of which get put on their business cards; mail@yourdomain.com is considered to be more professional compared to yourname@gmail.com; it's a small investment to get your own domain name
• Email Forwarding: if you want your own mail@yourdomain.com email, but you don't want to check another email inbox in addition to the others you have, you can forward the email, so mail@yourdomain.com will all get sent to yourname@gmail.com, and you can still receive and reply to the mail@yourdomain.com email
• Social Media (optional): students have included outbound links from their personal website to their social media, directing visitors to Instagram or Dribbble, which is advantageous since it shows visitors the breadth of creativity that you enjoy; you can also include outbound links to your LinkedIn profile
• Web Hosting: third-party companies will host your website files on a server, for you to publish them on the web, accessible through your domain name, examples of Bluehost and 1&1 and HostGator, WordPress.com is even considered a hosting company, since it stores your files online; full-feature Web Hosting will include your website and also custom emails, such that georgedesigns.com would be where your website lives, and you can also get email through them such as mail@georgedesigns.com

Required Reading:

• Get your folio online quickly + easily
• What Creative Directors Are Looking for in an Online Portfolio
• Using a blog, a CMS, for a folio

For Illustration & VCOM majors, the Student's Personal Website is worth 80 points total*:

• 37.5% Craftsmanship, Technical Execution: the imagery shown is of good quality, the website functions across browsers including a desktop, tablet, and mobile browser; the site functions without any errors, and with all links functioning; appropriate web languages used for the site's rendering (Flash sites are not permitted)
• 50% Composition: the layout is unified, using a grid; has readable typography; well organized with a sense of hierarchy; allows for images to be featured, or viewed largely enough for inspection; student has applied their identity (ID, logo, colors, fonts) and doing so unifies their entire system together (printed portfolio, resume, business card) into one complete "total design"
• 12.5% Presentation/Professionalism: the website is suitable for the student to promote themselves with upon graduation, and to use as an online portfolio to showcase their work; meeting all deadlines
• Built the site yourself using a CMS, even with its own template. Or build the site on your own, coding the HTML and CMS yourself.
• You cannot hire a developer, student developer, or other person to build your site for you. 
• *DiFD students will have a different rubric to adhere to, and must hand code their site from scratch, meaning no CMS if you're in DiFD.

Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Squarespace, WordPress, Tumblr, Cargo Collective, Indexr, Squarespace, or Indexhibit, are an acceptable way to design/layout your portfolio. Students may also create their site on their own through "straight-up HTML and CSS" that you create without a CMS.

Students may choose to use any of the aforementioned CMS tools above. Any other methods must be approved by the instructor on or before Feb. 15.

Wed. Mar. 1 is a targeted deadline for each student's personal website.

See the class calendar for more deadlines.