Research Guides: Studio Art Library Resources: Portfolios & Presentations

Books on Portfolios

Portfolio Design by Harold Linton
Call Number: NA2714 .L56 1996
The Architect’s Portfolio: Planning, Design, Production by Andreas Luescher
Call Number: In delivery

Presenting Your Work

Whether giving a presentation to a group or showing your portfolio to an employer, school, or gallery, presenting your work can be nerve-racking. This page features some tips on giving a professional presentation.

Suggestions for Creating a Portfolio

Photographing Your Artwork
The hardest part of creating a portfolio can be to take good pictures of your work. This site has some tips about shooting your work and then goes over some Photoshop methods of cleaning up the images.
Slide Portfolio Preparation
While most everyone has transitioned to digital portfolios, there's a chance you may still have to create an analog slide portfolio at some point. On the second page of this document from SUNY, there are tips about what kind of film to use, how to set up the shoot, lighting, and more.
National Portfolio Day
Sometimes the biggest favor you can do for yourself is get a professional to look over your portfolio and tell you what they think. National Portfolio Day exists for this exact purpose--you can meet with representatives from colleges (there are days for undergraduate and graduate students in art and architecture).
A Word to the Wise
The format, size, and style of your portfolio will probably depend greatly on where you're planning to submit it. Don't send the same CD-ROM to every place you apply whether it's an art school or a gallery. Even art schools all have different requirements for portfolios, so do your homework beforehand.

ARTstor OIV

Sometimes it's hard to get images into a PowerPoint or other kind of presentation in the right size or file format. ARTstor offers a free Offline Image Viewer for students and professors to download to help them create good-quality presentations. The OIV's features include:

Images that you can pan and scan during the presentation;
Download larger images than a regular jpeg download;
You can import existing Powerpoint presentations into them.