Building Your CD-Based Portfolio

George Wedding

Living the creative life often means looking for new clients, and prospective clients have an annoying habit of wanting to see portfolios before they hire new talent. Of course, merely selecting the content for a portfolio is a gut-wrenching, angst-filled, sadomasochistic process of self-evaluation that few of us want to face. After enduring that, creating the physical portfolio should be simple. Right?

The reality is, producing portfolios and presentations to attract business can be time-consuming, and you end up with a package that ideally would be shopped around in armored car: A stylish, oversized presentation case can cost $250 or more, and a set of prints can be equally expensive. Add mounting supplies, assembly, and shipping, and total cost can easily surpass $500, not including the duplicates you need to keep on hand.

If you’ve been searching for a less-costly solution to this self-promotion dilemma, CD portfolios may be the answer, especially now that CDR/RW recorders are relatively inexpensive. Once you purchase a CDR/RW drive, it is far more cost-effective to produce, duplicate, and mail a CD-based presentation instead of a bulky print portfolio. An Internet Web site can reduce the need for such mailings (and the related production costs), but current bandwidth limitations mean that many companies and artists still have an occasional need to ship custom presentations to prospective clients.

Several mass-market and niche software products are available to create CD presentations. However, no single application offers all the controls that would allow the seamless integration of professional-quality text, headlines, graphics, still photography, and motion pictures into a cross-platform show. For instance, many of the products I considered lack the sophisticated text (tracking, leading and kerning, horizontal scale and vertical scale) and ICC color-management controls that are essential for the production of the best on-screen presentations. To get these controls, one option is to use a page-layout program such as Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress, or Adobe PageMaker.

To build my own digital portfolio, I turned to InDesign (now in version v1.52) and Adobe Acrobat (v4.05). You might be surprised at the choice of Acrobat, which is better known for pre-press uses. Even everyday users may not realize that it also provides basic multimedia tools that allow the creation of full-screen, “slide show” type presentations. While still not the perfect solution, InDesign and Acrobat provide more of the tools I need than any single presentation product I’ve tried to date. Using any page-layout program in conjunction with Acrobat can be a powerful way to create “slide” shows; I came to prefer InDesign over other page-layout solutions because it allows finished shows to be exported directly into the PDF format for final Acrobat editing. At deadline time, Adobe was set to release Acrobat 5.0, but the software had yet to arrive in our offices.

Of course, InDesign and Acrobat aren’t the only tools around that can be used to build good, effective digital portfolios. Most simply won’t give discerning photographers and graphics pros the flexibility we demand. However, software such as Macromedia’s Flash 5/Freehand Studio, Fireworks or Director 8 Shockwave Internet Studio also might be attractive options, particularly if you want to avoid the fairly static nature of a slideshow. I’ll be exploring Flash and other options in the future. In the meantime, the method I outline here will move you well into the new millennium — and give you a CD-based portfolio that should help you win clients and impress friends.

Overview
We’ll get to the details in a minute, but in general the process I used to create my own CD-based porfolio goes something like this: I use InDesign to lay out the pages, Photoshop to edit and prepare my images, InDesign to export the slideshow to PDF format, and Acrobat to add any additional multimedia files, such as movies or audio clips. Then I burn the CD, using Adaptec Toast.

For my portfolio, I needed separate on-screen presentations for photography and writing. I envisioned that these portfolio files typically would be shown to individual editors or art directors and (not to large groups) and would be delivered on CD by mail or in person using my Apple PowerBook G3/300 with a 1024×768 pixel screen.

Here are the steps I used to create my CD-based portfolios.

InDesign: Template Design
For each of my two portfolios — one for photography, one for writing — I used the Document Setup menu to create a digital file in the Letter page format with Landscape Orientation, so that the show can be viewed on-screen or printed on paper. To get the best results, you’ll need at least two Master pages — one for Title slides and one for Image slides. If you plan to integrate some detailed text into a show, you may want to add Master pages for that as well. Because I also wanted to include three tightly edited resume pages at the back of the presentation, I used four Master pages with one basic layout grid.

Map out the usual design details like background colors, margin settings, number of columns, gutters, leading grid, header, footer and page number use, etc. Use InDesign’s Show Ruler command (CMD/CTRL R) to measure the maximum dimensions for horizontal and vertical image sizes that will fit into the leading grid.

My title pages feature top and bottom 1-point rules, a document title, and page numbers, and vertical pictures on these pages are slightly smaller than those placed on other content pages:

IMAGE SIZES
TITLE PAGES: Horizontal images (9 inches); Verticals (6 inches)
OTHER PAGES: Horizontal images (9 inches); Verticals (6.75 inches)

InDesign’s Edit menu presents a Document Color Settings submenu. Ideally, you’re working with a calibrated display, and you’ve checked the Enable Color Management option. The other options should be set as follows:

SOURCE PROFILE: Your latest monitor calibration profile
RENDERING INTENT: Solid Color: Relative Colorimetric
Images: Perceptual

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