AIGA-Birmingham Student Portfolio Review
Yesterday (Saturday) I participated as a reviewer for a portfolio review that the local AIGA chapter puts on each year. Not so much a formal review, it gives students a chance to have their worked critiqued by someone who is looking at it for the first time, as apposed to their professors.
I had participated in a senior portfolio review for Samford University a few years ago, but this was different. Instead of sitting on a panel of 3-4 people and looking at work in a formal presentation setting, this was just sort of a sit down, tell me about your work and I will give you my thoughts on what I see. More of a chance for the students to refine their portfolio before going through final review and, eventually, job interviews.
I was there as an Interactive Design Professional, so the students that I saw generally had some sort of Web design work in their portfolio (all but one I believe). After talking with the students and looking over their designs, I can still see where many traditional design programs are getting Web design wrong.
When I would ask them about he Web design classes they had taken, many of them referred to the Dreamweaver class that they took last semester. I was sure to make a point that if they were wanting to venture into Web design as a career, they needed to learn to code sites by hand. When you know the HTML well enough to code it by hand, you are able to trouble shoot rendering issues faster than you can using the WYSIWYG mode, especially when it comes to the many different browsers that the site has the potential to be viewed in.
At any rate, it was great to be able to see what kind of work is being produced in the design schools these days as apposed to 5-7 years ago when I was going through. I hope I get an opportunity to do it again soon.
