SeeWilsonDesign – Portfolio

Graphics 1 Final Portfolio

For my final portfolio in Graphic Communications (at the University of Houston) I was assigned to collect all of my sketches from throughout the semester into a wire-bound volume. I knew that a wire-bound book would ultimately just be white noise in the grading process (because every student, in every section, was planning on producing their portfolio this way), so I made the choice to utilize several of the resources I had at my disposal as a professional designer.

Specifically, I took advantage of the ability to scan documents extremely quickly using a copy machine (when creating the catalogue I scanned and setup over 300 images) and obtained access to a Duplo glue-binding machine. I also created a custom die, which allowed me to cut tabs into each of the pages, making the catalogue far easier to navigate.

After grading the book was photographed by the UH School of Art and placed on their website alongside senior-level projects, as an example of the work their Graphics Communications students were producing.

To the right (below on mobile) are photos of the completed catalogue, as well as examples of page setup.

Year2011
Categories Print Handcrafted

Graphics Portfolio Catalogue - Tabs & Side

One problem I had to overcome when building the book was the issue of having concepts that were significantly wider than the book itself. Typically, one would just scale the image down and be done with it, but I didn’t want to take this approach, meaning that I had to insert and fold images. I knew this would cause the book to tip (i.e.: have the thickness at the spine be thinner than the thickness of the rest of the book), so I hand-built custom pages that were thicker everywhere but the middle, where the folded image was placed. An example of this page setup is featured below.

Each die-cut section of the book held a single project from earlier in the semester, and was organized into the following format: project brief, hand-drawn concepts, final product, and grade sheet. A small portion of project 3.2 is displayed below.