Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Like most good work, effective portfolios exist as a fait accompli. You can only
imagine how they got that way. The most fascinating and difficult aspects of the
interface design process are hidden from view. Wouldn't it be excit-
ing to sit on the shoulder of a master as she steps through her
thinking about design development, organization, and process? It
would indeed, and it might even influence your own ideas. Layla
Keramat offers us a window into her process.
Keramat is an interaction and corporate designer who has
worked for and with some of the biggest brands worldwide. And she
has a potential problem to solve with her portfolio. Although she
has an enormous body of work, in a world where everyone expects to
find a neat package online, she can't share. Most of her best projects
were done under rigorous client agreements. She can present a digital portfolio on her
laptop, but it would violate copyright and contract to distribute it online.
So how does she approach the conundrum? We follow her thinking as she cre-
ates the map for a comprehensive laptop presentation, with a unique grouping
approach. Then she isolates aspects of that presentation to create “tastes” for her
specific audiences. Last, she uses the power of connectivity to build an online person-
ality that enhances the tastes. The result: a comprehensive development process that
meets her unusual needs.
Why create a portfolio
now? To get short-listed
on a recruiter's search.
To s h o w h i r i n g ma n -
agers that I'm qualified
for an interview. To
share my experiences.
—Layla Keramat
Content
Organizing a mature and diverse body of work is a mixed blessing. There are so
many ways to group this work. Keramat could group by category of project: user inter-
face design, e-commerce, packaging, or concept. Or she
could separate the work into print versus interaction.
Yet as her work changed over time, she kept coming
back to simple chronology.
The more she tried different options, the more
Keramat began to notice that she had made a major
change in how she approached design. In her opinion,
it was so striking that it was a better way to group her
work than brand or chronology. Her intensely personal
way of grouping her early work is by intuition—emo-
tion, enthusiasm, gut feeling—and her more recent
My first ten years were driven by
intuition. I still subscribe to that
enthusiasm, and I want to pre-
serve that impression. But I also
enjoy understanding a client's
corporate communication needs.
I realized that I could categorize
these two features in my portfo-
lio as “designed by intuition” and
“designed by process.”
—Layla Keramat
