Digitized Images, Mailers, and Promotions

Cleaning Up:
Let's start with some technical advice from the book "Designing a Digital Portfolio" on digitized art. She mentions that there is an order to how you should work when touching up a file for your portfolio. The order is as follows: Change the file type, then adjust any brightness and contrast and color you may need. After that, do your cleaning up and retouching then save a copy of the image. Once you've finished that, then sharpen, optimize and save in a compressed format.

When picking a file type to save your project as, pick something that fits your purpose. Some examples being TIFFs for photographs, EPS for illustration and publishing, AVI and MOV for moving image pieces, and PDF for publishing. Common files are easy to open on most computers.

The author says that the most common problems that are faced when trying to keep the quality from paper to screen are: tonal problems, combining and editing, size and resolution, and sharpness. Tonal Values is a range from darkest to lightest areas in an image. You should use the manual levels function when fixing important pieces like portfolio pieces because you have more control of how it looks. When it comes to editing problems in the picture, the author makes some good suggestions about line art and moire that you should look into. Another good piece of advice that I found helpful was in the category of sharpening. I could never get it right. The author says that you should only use it if you need it and when you do use it, only use it in the least amount through the tool called Unsharp Mask in Photoshop.
The book showcases the website www.eleveninc.com because of it's clarity and design. I looked at the site and I, too, found it to be clean and certainly not cluttered with too many things going on at once. I am going to keep it in mind as I try to work out these kinds of problems with my own portfolio site.

Presenting A Print Portfolio, Resumes, and Promotions:
In the book, "Building Design Portfolios," the author talks about presenting a print portfolio. She starts by saying that there should be an order to your printed pieces. The first piece should be a good strong design that gets the viewer interested in the other pieces. The order of the pieces is important and can help make the presentation better. Your portfolio should express who you are and your relationship to the world. By including captions on the pieces, you can keep your viewer informed and educated about each piece without you having to be there.
One thing that I found important that the author says is that an experienced designer can talk intelligently about what they've done with a piece and why they've done it. Good to know.

Something from the book that I knew already, but realized how important it really is from reading, is that your resume is a great chance to show off your excellent typeography work. It's a first impression that you can make you look very professional.

Promotions come in many varieties and sizes. One could be a mailer. These can either be reminders of your portfolio pieces or maybe attention grabbers. It doesn't have to be all elaborate like a book or something. In fact, if you can succesfully create a creative way to package your mailer on a low-budget, you might have a leg up. Some employers like to see that a designer can creatively solve something on a low budget and still have it look good. Books are more high-end and are usually for the highly successful designers and studios. They can also give the impression that you charge a large fee. CDs are better than sending an email because you don't have to compromise quality in order to make it fit into an inbox. However, if you do email a porfolio mailer, then make sure it's no more than 5 MB and a PDF. It's a common file that can be opened anywhere and usually keeps the quality high.