Storytelling with your portfolio

"How do I tell my story?" This is a common question I'm asked by my clients when we practice their portfolio presentations. In this section, we will explore five strategies for every portfolio that will help you use the language to communicate your story in a way that connects with your audience.

Very often with many of my clients, when they first explain their portfolio to me, their first tendency will be to just explain everything they can about the images in their portfolio without any narrative, story or insight. I understand why. It can be stressful to talk about the projects and your involvement but this is your opportunity to start building up a rapport with your audience.

The thing is, your pictures and images already tell the story.

Your audience has very little time to get into the nitty-gritty (the details) of your designs so they want to know the things that add value to your images. Don't tell your audience what they already know.

For example, don't tell them "this is a section" and "this is a plan." Hopefully already know that.

We want to know more. We want to know why it's in your portfolio. What is it about this particular image that shows your passions, interests, skills and abilities?

Here are my top 8 tips to help you craft the perfect story for your portfolio.

1) Know your top values and make sure the images match so you can explain these values .

What words and images come to mind when you think about what you value most as a designer? Innovation, creativity, seamless integration between landscape and building, design excellence, meticulous detailing? Choose 3-5 words and make sure there is at least one image for each word spread across different projects that helps demonstrate these values.

2) Show off your best work.

Curate 5–10 projects that align with the kind of work you want to be doing as well as the work of the architecture practices you like. Clarify what your audience seeks by checking for keywords (verbs and adjectives) in the job description and their website and accentuate how your expertise, skills and uniqueness with the intention to exceed their needs. Strive for flexibility and tailor what you show to the people viewing it.  Remember, respect the time and attention of your audience. Go deep on a few, broad on the rest — quality is what matters.

3) Know the story you will tell.

The story and narrative you tell in your portfolio can be as important as the work itself. Consider how these narratives are shaped by your motivation, aspirations, what is highlighted or omitted from the content of a project, who contributes to it (i.e., designers/engineers), why this particular project was chosen for inclusion — all have an effect. Consider all these points when you're preparing your portfolio:

Do you know clearly what each project will highlight? (Design skills, software capabilities, different scales of experience, collaboration, overcoming challenges, detail drawing

You might have one project that you consider your best. This one should come first but make sure you also have a strong project to end on also.

Do all the images contribute to the story? Have you removed the images that don't contribute extra information?

Does every project have detailed project information including the most important part - your role? (Year, location, program, size, client)

Do you have at least one project that displays your software drawing skills and even hand sketching skills?

Do you feel connected in some way to the values you chose in all of your projects?

4) Be clear about your role.
What leadership opportunities did you have in your organisation? How did that allow you to influence the project? If you only have a short amount of time to explain your portfolio, as an absolute minimum you want to talk about:

People + Process + Performance.

People - what and who was involved.

Process - what was the project process.

Performance - what did you do and what was your role?

Importantly, know how to describe each project with the STARI method:

Situation: set the project context (where, when, who, how, why)

Task: what was required?

Action: What was your role in the project?

Result: what happened in the situation?

Insight: Your learning or insight.

Examples of insights:

Challenges you faced during stages of the project and how you overcame them

What the project experience taught you?

What insights you had about key decisions made?

What surprised you?

What software tools you used and why and how they contributed to the project?

What stories the drawings or images tell about the process?

Using what clauses and cleft sentences to share your insights:

What I found interesting about this project was ...

One challenging aspect of this project was ...

Something that surprised me about this project was ...

5 Reflect upon your learnings

A portfolio should demonstrate not only what you know, but also your ability to adapt and grow with your knowledge. What worked well? What do you want to try differently next time? You're trying to demonstrate how do you deal with failures and how you use resilience to bounce back

6 Use the active voice for project descriptions

The active voice describes a sentence where the subject performs the action stated by the verb. It follows a clear subject + verb + object construct that's easy to read. In fact, sentences constructed in the active voice add impact to your writing and allow you to clearly demonstrate your role and the roles of others in the project.

E.g. During the Schematic Design phase, we incorporated an acoustic report into our documents.

I prepared the detailed documentation package and details for all the interior fit-out.

7 Include hand sketching or personal projects that allow some of your personality to also come through.

Personally, I think it's also important to include something that adds your unique touch to the portfolio while also adding to your values. If creativity is one of your values, could you show any personal projects that allow you to demonstrate this value? For example, for me, this would include some of my urban sketches as it shows I have an interest in improving my hand sketching outside just my work projects.

Takeaway: find an image in your portfolio and post it as a comment. Answer one of the above questions to give us more insight into the project than the image already tells us and ask for feedback on your response.

Here you'll find a guide to the language to use in your physical portfolio as well as tips for using language to present:

• A checklist of how to prepare the document in a layout that helps you to present it.
• Tips for presenting your portfolio.
• Common errors and how to fix them.