RE: A cautionary tale
But, if I was interviewing for a job, I would be cautious about leaving a
portfolio myself. What to do?
Back when I had an actual portfolio, my design portfolio would contain
examples of past work I was proud of from a design and structure
standpoint. In the interview I could then go through each page
and discuss, these were the design or organization challenges I had,
here's how I solved them, this book was one of a set of twelve, I
collaborated with another writer on this book, the engineer would not talk to me
for this book but opened up when I fed him donuts, for this color example
I had to go visit the printer fourteen times to make sure it came out
right etc, and so on. The design portfolio was good for sitting down and
covering a lot of overview ground about my past accomplishments. I could
also kill about half an hour in an interview talking about it. :)
That portfolio came and left with me. HOWEVER for each and every interview
I also made up a clips portfolio of my best *writing* samples, short
examples printed or photocopied from the same doc sets in the design
portfolio. Each writing sample had a paragraph of discussion relating
to the design portfolio and the whole thing had a nice cover page with
the name of the company and preferably the hiring manager I was
interviewing with, bound simply and inexpensively. That latter portfolio
could stay with the company, in fact, I didn't care if it never came back.
I'm only recently starting to interview again after a long break away
from the business to work on third-party books, and I'm actually not
sure what I'm going to do now that the web makes it so easy to just post
samples online. My previous system worked extraordinarily well because it
gave the impression that I had made an effort to prepare for the interview
and that I really cared that the hiring manager had an opportunity to look
over my work at his or her leisure.
I still have to think about it some more (but quickly, I have an interview
tomorrow morning. :)
-Laura
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RE: A cautionary tale: From: Steve Shepard
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