Develop Your Portfolio

Hello Students,
Having a polished and professional looking portfolio is key to your success in finding work after High School and moving on to developing a career. Download the ROP Portfolio Handbook to use as a guide for creating your own portfolio, a requirement in all ROP classes.

Portfolio's are due by May and must be ready for presentation, evaluation and critique (make it perfect!) but that is no reason to slack on this project. You should put great time and care into creating the professional side of your portfolio and then you will be ready to add your creative projects as the semester progresses. You will complete a digital version as a PDF file for evaluation. Class winner will be able to print and prepare their portfolio for inclusion in the Portfolio Showcase competition. Everyone can print a copy to keep and report covers will be provided if possible.


Remember that the best portfolio in class will be sent to the portfolio design competition that ROP has at the end of each school year, your portfolio will compete against other graphic design classes across the county, and there are prizes!
A judge evaluates print portfolio's from past entrants...
Portfolio Cover Design Assignment:
  • Design an eye catching cover design for you your portfolio.
  • Include your name, the title of this class, the school you are currently attending and the year.
  • Design your cover for standard letter size 8.5X11 inch paper.
  • When you are done print your cover and begin assembling your portfolio.


Portfolio Development Long Term Assignment:
  • Your portfolio must be created in Indesign and the final file must be a multi-page PDF document.
  • Use the Pages palette to create multiple pages for your portfolio with Indesign.
  • Your portfolio cover, table of contents and all materials should look clean and consistent. Use consistent design style across all aspects of your portfolio, this includes color, typography, layout and style.

Your Portfolio must contain in this order: See portfolio handbook for more details...
  1. Cover page with your name, class title, year. Spend some time on this, it should show good design skill and be reflective of your personality.
  2. Table of contents.
  3. Letter of Introduction.
  4. Resume.
  5. List of References.
  6. Letter of Recommendation -  cannot be from your ROP teacher or a family member
  7. 6 or more work samples with written explanation about the work, why is it important to your career choice? What did the project entail, what were the challenges and difficulties? Give us details.
How Your Portfolio Is Evaluated:
  • Contains required content and format
  • Well organized
  • Free of grammar mistakes
  • contains ROP related work samples
  • Shows creativity
  • Nice appearance
  • Shows skill development
  • Appropriate for use in job search
  • Professional appearance
  • Nice presentation
  • Shows good design and wise choice of color palettes
  • Shows consistency across all pages
  • Reflects your style, personality and interests
A print portfolio can take many forms, it can be professionally bound, stitched by hand or bound with a spiral ring... how will you create your portfolio, what will make it stand out above the rest?

Tips For Winning The Portfolio Competition:
In the last few years the portfolio competition has gotten fierce, especially for the graphic design category. Other schools have printing facilities that we don't, so you must use your creativity, ingenuity and eye for design to stand above the rest. Consider purchasing a large format portfolio binder and printing work samples at 11X17", or consider making a hand-bound book format to showcase your work. The limits are only contained by your creativity!
Use this as a rough guide to laying out your own portfolio...
Ok, have fun!

Previous Student Portfolio Cover Design Samples:
P.S. There are more samples on the back table for review...





Hello Students,
To develop your print portfolio we will use Adobe InDesign's powerful layout software to create multiple page document with compelling design, color, typography and content. Use this post and the details below to explore and become familiar with InDesign


Launch and Explore InDesign
  • Go to the dock and launch InDesign, or look in your Applications folder to find the app
  • Go to the File Menu and create a New Document
  • Go to the Window Menu and set your Workspace to Advanced
  • Explore the tool bar, click on the text tool and draw a text box to create text, try the shape tools and look for the color modifiers to change colors at the top of the screen
  • Open all the palettes under the Window Menu and explore all the functions, look at the quick guides below for reference
  • See if you can create text of different sizes, change the colors, modify the text kerning and tracking and draw shapes in different colors and with different borders
  • Try importing an image, use File Menu/Place... you can insert a photo into a shape, or drop it onto the page you want
  • Try opening the Pages Palette and create multiple pages
  • When you are comfortable, begin creating your portfolio!
Hidden Tools and Shortcut Keys

Character Formatting Panel In InDesign

Paragraph Formatting Panel in InDesign

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