It isn't easy finding a job these days and for those working in the creative fields like graphic design, illustration, photography, filmmaking, and music, a digital portfolio is just the shiny object you need to catch the attention of a prospective employer. But you can't just slap a few files on a CD and call it a night. As Cynthia Baron points out in Designing a Digital Portfolio--a thorough guide to digital portfolios--your first impression is critical and good preparation will pay off.

The books begins with soul-searching: what work are you hoping to get, who's your audience, what style of presentation should you choose, and what technology--Zip, CD, DVD? Effective portfolios from various fields are analyzed, for example, one for an industrial designer or a flash animation artist. If you happen to do both or are otherwise a jack-of-all-trades, Baron outlines your strategy for targeting your audience and deciding how to focus your presentation.

There're several great chapters on prepping your work, collecting it (do you have your process materials, like pencil sketches?), digitizing the non-digital and cleaning it up (like stitching together scans or effective cropping), nitty-gritty items like optimizing and encoding (crucial if you don't want your future boss frustrated by large files), and dealing with that neglected cousin of the visually creative: good written content.

Next, the book considers delivery (for example, Web versus a portable portfolio on CD or DVD), a presentation metaphor (for example, gallery or diary), and the navigational master plan. The chapter on copyrights and attribution are worth the cover price alone. (For example, do you know who owns the artwork you just created for that latest brochure? Do you know how to present a large project on which you worked as part of a team?)

Throughout the book, Baron profiles some stellar examples of digital portfolios, most of which are viewable online, for example, illustrator Michael Bartalos's Web site at bartalos.com. And the appendices offer even more resources to help and inspire you. --Angelynn Grant

Book Description
The world has gone digital--which means that a paper portfolio is no longer good enough. These days, as a creative professional, you're expected to be able to show your work on demand--whether that means emailing it to a client, displaying it on a Web site, or delivering it on CD or DVD. This book shows you how. Using a combination of step-by-step instructions and inspiring examples, veteran author Cynthia Baron takes you through the entire process of designing a digital portfolio--from developing a concept and choosing a medium, to scanning work created with traditional materials; optimizing digitized art; repurposing digital material; creating a portfolio Web site, CD, or DVD; producing a portable portfolio; and avoiding technical pitfalls when digitizing, organizing, and delivering the final product. You'll also find loads of insights from the professionals who evaluate artist portfolios everyday--agency heads, art directors, and designers--plus handy checklists, a run-down of dos and don'ts, case studies, and tips.

From the Publisher
If you’ve looked at any of the job classifieds lately, you know employment opportunities are slim. With so few jobs available and so many people looking, your portfolio must command attention. Fortunately, long-time teacher Cynthia Baron has written Designing a Digital Portfolio. It is packed with ideas for researching and marketing, and it includes everything you need to set up and distribute a digital portfolio that will get you noticed. Throughout, she provides several case studies, and she’s interviewed several artists and employers who openly their share successes and mistakes. This full-color book is full of inspiration, how-to, and what not to do. If you - or someone you know - is looking for a job, Designing a Digital Portfolio will make your efforts more streamlined and your outcome more successful. Jennifer Eberhardt (feedback@newriders.com)

From the Back Cover
Anyone working as an artist or designer today has a wealth of tools and media at their disposal to show off their work. However, pulling together a focused, effective digital portfolio requires more than just a mastery of tools and design: You need to choose a medium, develop a concept, digitize traditional work, optimize and repurpose digital art, consider copyright issues, test the portfolio, and more. Lucky for you, noted designer, author, and educator Cynthia L. Baroncovers all of this and more in her practical and inspiring Designing a Digital Portfolio. Through step-by-step instructions and real-world examples, this beautiful four-color volume shows you how to tailor your portfolio to target markets and avoid common pitfalls of digitizing, organizing, and delivering the final product, whether on CD, DVD-ROM, or the Web. Along the way you'll find quotes and case studies from agency heads, art directors, and designers. Numerous sidebars offer brass-tacks explanations of a number of topics: hardware and DVD-content checklists, resolution and image-size do's and don'ts, a primer on Adobe Acrobat, an of overview of Apple's iDVD, and more.

About the Author
Cynthia L. Baron is Technical Director at Northeastern University in Boston, and a lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts and the Multimedia Studies program. She also holds an MBA with a concentration in Marketing. She has authored or co-authored several books, most recently The Little Digital Camera Book for Peachpit Press. She is the editor of the DesignWhys series for Rockport Publishers, and former contributing editor to Critique Magazine, one of the most important design publications of the 90s.

FROM THE PUBLISHER