Ten works by Friday: portfolio selection, file compliance and captions
A candidate applying to a diploma in applied art must submit a PDF portfolio of 10 works, A4, sRGB, under 20 MB, with captions, by Friday. Current holdings: four still-life studies from the same set-up, three traced film-poster designs, one competent landscape, a 40-page sketchbook, six rough logo thumbnails for a fictitious coffee brand, and a two-hour exam life study. The guidelines state that no more than two works may be derived from photographs, that sketchbook pages are encouraged, and that process should be shown. The candidate wants to include all four still lifes because they were graded highest, and to leave out the logo thumbnails because they are "messy". The working file is 12 works at 600 dpi, 68 MB, with no captions; the logo work exists only in a notebook and would need photographing.
1. Which ten works should be submitted, in what order, and why? Address the traced designs and the four still lifes explicitly.
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Select against the brief's criteria, not against the marks the work received.
- Still lifes: four studies from one set-up demonstrate repetition, not range. Keep the two best - the one with the strongest value structure and one showing a different handling (colour rather than tone) - and drop the other two.
- Traced film posters: the highest-risk items in the folder. At most two may be included under the photograph-derived limit, and only if captioned honestly as studies after an existing poster. Better still, replace one with a re-designed version where layout and typography are the candidate's own, and say so. Presenting traced published work as original is what ends an interview.
- Logo thumbnails: they must go in. They are the only applied-art work present, they show process, and annotated roughs are exactly what a panel wants to see.
- Final ten, sequenced: two still lifes (observation), landscape, life study, one sketchbook spread, two logo/process sheets, one re-designed poster, one typography experiment, one creative composition.
Order the PDF from observation to invention, so the reader watches the candidate's eye develop before being asked to judge the ideas. The sequence itself is part of the argument that the candidate can edit.
2. The file is 68 MB at 600 dpi with no captions. Set out the technical plan to reach compliance without rescanning, and the checks to run before submitting.
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The file fails on three counts - resolution, colour management and captions - all fixable without rescanning.
- Resolution: 600 dpi at A4 is about 4960 × 7016 px, roughly four times what is needed. 300 dpi at A4 (2480 × 3508 px) is ample; 200 dpi is acceptable for sketchbook spreads. Downsampling first will cut the file to a fraction of 68 MB.
- Colour: convert images to sRGB and embed the profile, not merely tag them. Untagged files look dull or oversaturated on a reviewer's screen, and a painting judged on wrong colour is judged unfairly.
- Format: export as PDF with JPEG compression at high quality (roughly 80–85), keeping captions as live text rather than images. If still over 20 MB, lower image quality rather than cutting pages - the brief fixes 10 works.
- Captions: one under each image on the same page, in a small but legible type size.
Pre-submission checks: open the PDF on a different machine and in a different viewer; confirm the file size as reported there; check each page at 100% zoom on a laptop screen, because that is how the panel will see it; and confirm the caption for the traced work is present before the file leaves the candidate's hands.
3. Write the caption format the candidate should use, and explain how the logo thumbnails and sketchbook should be presented as process.
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A student-portfolio caption has three jobs: identify the work, state the problem, and show what was decided.
Template: "Still life with brass jug, poster colour on paper, 56 × 76 cm, 2024. Lit by a single window; the exercise was to keep the white cube and the brass jug in separate value bands while letting reflected red from the apple into the shadow."
Presenting process work:
- Photograph notebook pages flat under even, diffuse light, filling the frame.
- Choose four or five logo thumbnails that show a change of direction, not four that repeat one idea.
- Add one line of annotation, e.g. "the first three read as a leaf; the chosen mark uses the cup's negative space instead."
- Show the final mark at a usable size beside the thumbnail it came from.
- For the sketchbook, submit a spread as one work, captioned with the date range and what was being investigated.
Do not write self-congratulatory captions. A sentence naming the constraint - "only two colours plus black were allowed" - is worth more than praise of the result, because the panel is assessing how the candidate thinks, not how the candidate writes about themselves.