*** From the Archives ***

This article is from July 28, 2004, and is no longer current.

Design How-To: Repurposing Art for a Digital Portfolio

This story is taken from “Designing A Digital Portfolio.”
Peachpit Press is offering this book at a discount. Click here to learn more.


A good-looking portfolio is essential to securing clients and establishing your reputation. With it you convey your style and promote your skills. But in an era when resumes are posted on the Web and job interviews are conducted by e-mail, presenting your work in a traditional large black portfolio case may not be the best option — indeed it may be impossible to show your work in person. A digital portfolio that you can post on the Web, send via e-mail, or dispatch on CD-ROM is the answer.
Designing a successful digital portfolio requires planning and foresight in addition to good technical skills. Repurposing traditional artwork for a digital portfolio is sure to raise many questions. What resolution should your images be? What’s the best way to show oversize art? What color palettes are best for onscreen reading? How can you reproduce special print effects digitally?

In this excerpt from “Designing A Digital Portfolio,” Cynthia Baron shows you to repurpose and optimize your work.
We’ve posted this excerpt as a PDF file. All you do is click this link “Repurposing and Optimizing” to open the PDF file in your Web browser. You can also download the PDF to your machine for later viewing.
To open the PDF, you’ll need a full version of Adobe Acrobat (5 or higher) or the Adobe Reader, which you can download here:
https://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html.
To learn how to configure your browser for viewing PDF files, see the Adobe Reader tech support page.
Excerpted from “Designing a Digital Portfolio” © 2003 New Riders Publishing. Reproduced by permission of Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as New Riders. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
 

  • anonymous says:

    If you are actively working for clients, do you actually have this kind of time to spend on your own work?
    The only time I will ever find to do this is if I am unemployed.

  • urstwile says:

    When I downloaded and printed the PDF of this file, it appeared that not all of the fonts had been properly embedded/subsetted, so a lot of the spacing in the text was weird.

    Otherwise, I found the content to be very informative.

    It seemed like an odd problem, given the content of the article vis a vis maximum readability for a variety of computers/software versions.

  • anonymous says:

    This is real world useful info, something a professional should think about to get to the next level

  • >