Charlene Chandrasekaran, creative director at Droga5, says keep your portfolio to seven or eight of your best pieces and swap them out as you grow. Include side projects to show personality, frame work as collaborative, and mix big and small brands. She prefers funny and wrong over boring and safe.
I'm Charlene. I am a creative director at Droga5 alongside my work partner Dan Morris, and we've been here for 4 years. And I'm going to give you some top tips on how to get your portfolio looking really good for when you start entering the industry. When you're putting your portfolio together for the first time, I think it's very easy to start overthinking and thinking about what you're going to put in it. Feeling like you've just got to put everything in there. I would say generally about 7 or 8 campaigns in your portfolio at any one time is probably the right number. Being quite harsh on yourself and sort of saying, right, I like this campaign and I like this one, I like this one, not sure this is going to do very well, because there's going to be loads of opportunities where you can show more work. I think peppering your portfolio with a few sort of side projects that you sort of do outside of advertising is a really good way to get your personality across. And those kind of things help to sort of like give you a bit of standout. And I think your personality definitely sings in those little areas. You don't have to do loads. There's something to be said about someone who talks in a way which feels collaborative. You win and fail as a team. See it as a sort of a partnership rather than sort of saying, oh, I did that, I did this. It's just not a great way to have a good, long-lasting partnership. A shorthand way to get across a particular thing that you've contributed to a campaign or a project. Write something in the description, something that sort of gives them a little taste of like, okay, this is what I did and this is how it all came out. If you're spending hours sort of crafting a piece of work and then for 5 creative directors to be like, it's not working, it can— you just feel terrible. So I think unless it's critical to a piece of work. I would concentrate on the ideas. I'd get the idea down quickly, neatly, concisely. What's helpful is having the sort of side projects in there as well, which you can craft, because no one's going to take that away from you. No one can say, oh, I don't really like that side project you're doing. It's just a safe way for you to showcase yourself and your skills. You can't keep your book relevant to every agency that you go to. You can't have a tailor-made portfolio for everyone, which is why being happy with your portfolio and just having a wide range of big brands and small ones sort of mixed together is important. We're looking for something more than what we're doing, I guess, is what people would probably say. And actually seeing a book that hasn't got any restraints and is like just liberated from sort of the constraints that we have to go through is really nice and it makes for fun reading. Some of the more interesting stuff is when students come in and they've tackled a really hard brand, like a really mundane bread, and you just think, God, that's really hard, how have they done this? And they've come in and they've just done something really fun and light-hearted and haven't taken it too seriously. It's really nice. I want to see something light and impossible, but there's a grain of truth in it. Like, I'd rather see something funny and wrong rather than boring and dry. So these are my 5 top tips to getting you to a really good portfolio, in my opinion. Don't be overly precious about the work that goes into your portfolio because you're going to be doing it a lot and throwing away a lot. Don't be constrained by the things that we're doing in the industry, like case studies and films and things like that. Just do your own thing. If you're in a team, look after the team. You'll be working together for a long time. And you should see your team as a business working for a business. Stick to 7 or 8 campaigns when you're showing your portfolio and then replace them when you need to. And then add in maybe some of your own sort of personal projects so that it doesn't feel like it's just advertising is your life. We want to see other things that you're doing outside of this industry.
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