Choosing Your Projects

The most useful habit you can build is to stop asking 'is there any reason to leave this out?' and start asking 'what is the reason to put this in?' The first question keeps everything; the second forces each project to make its case. And a project only earns its place when it clears a decent bar on three separate things, all of which matter and none of which substitutes for the others:

> Is it strong? Is it showable? Does it fit this reader?

Strength is the quality of the work itself - the idea, the design decisions, how far you carried it, how resolved it feels. This is what most people think curation is about, and it is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Showability is whether you actually have the material to present the project well: good photographs, legible drawings, a clear story, images at a resolution that will not fall apart on the page. A brilliant project you can only show through three dark phone snaps and a blurry site plan is, for portfolio purposes, not yet usable - however good it was in real life. Fit is whether this particular reader, making this particular decision, will care about it at all. A beautifully resolved, gorgeously shot competition entry for a museum is the wrong lead piece when you are applying to a studio that does nothing but hospitality interiors.

Hold these three apart in your head, because each failure mode is different and each has a different fix. Strong but unshowable is a project to re-photograph or re-draw before you can use it - a task, not a verdict. Showable but weak is a project that will quietly lower your average no matter how nicely it sits on the page - cut it. Strong and showable but irrelevant is a project for a different application - keep it in the drawer, ready. Very few projects are genuinely excellent on all three at once, and that is exactly the point: the ones that are become your portfolio, and the rest wait their turn or step aside. When you feel the pull to include something because it took months, or because you have nothing else in that category, or because you simply like it, name that pull for what it is - the archive instinct - and set it against the three questions instead.

Turn the three questions into a quick, honest scoring pass. List every project you could conceivably show. Beside each, give it a mark out of five for strength, a mark out of five for showability, and a mark out of five for fit to one specific reader you have chosen. Keep it fast and be brutal - this is not the moment for kindness to your past self.

The scoring surfaces things a single 'good/bad' judgement hides. You will find a project you love that scores a 5 on strength and a 2 on showability - now you know your job is to re-shoot or re-draw it, not to bin it. You will find a workmanlike project that scores a 3 on strength but a 5 on showability and a 5 on fit - and you may well include it, because a solid, relevant, beautifully presented project can outperform a stronger one you can barely show. You will find the project that took you a whole semester scoring 2, 2, 2, and feel the sting of that honestly - and cut it.

A worked example. Imagine a student choosing between six pieces for a first job at a residential studio:

Project            strength  showable  fit   notes
House on a slope      5         4        5    lead piece - strong + relevant
Museum competition    5         5        2    superb, but wrong sector
Studio furniture      3         5        4    solid, great photos, relevant
Urban master-plan     4         2        3    strong idea, no good images
First-year library    2         3        2    early, weak - cut
Live-build pavilion    4         4        5    hands-on, relevant, keep

Read down the columns and the decisions almost make themselves. The house and the pavilion lead. The furniture earns a place on fit and showability. The master-plan is a re-draw-then-reconsider. The museum competition, brilliant as it is, is held back for a design-led studio where it fits. The first-year library goes. Notice that the strongest single project on the page - the competition - does not make this particular cut, because fit is a real lens, not a tie-breaker. That is the discipline: you are not ranking your work in the abstract, you are choosing an argument for one reader.

Scoring tells you what you have; the cut line tells you what goes in. This is where most portfolios are won or lost, and where most people flinch. Draw a line and keep only the projects above it - and make that line high.

How high? For a main portfolio, most students and early-career designers are best served by roughly four to eight strong, well-shown, relevant projects. For a fast job application or an emailed short version, three to five can be plenty. These are not rules handed down from nowhere; they follow directly from how portfolios are read. Your reader has limited attention and is judging you by your average and your weakest link. Every project you add past the point of genuine strength dilutes the strong ones and adds another chance to disappoint. The maths is unforgiving: a portfolio of six 5s is far stronger than one of six 5s plus four 3s, even though the second contains more good work, because the reader experiences the whole, not the highlights.

The hardest cuts are not the weak projects - those are easy once you are honest. The hardest are the good projects that simply do not serve this argument: the strong piece in the wrong sector, the beautiful thing that duplicates what a better project already shows, the seventh good project when six is already plenty. Cutting those is the mark of real judgement, and readers can feel it. A tight portfolio radiates a quiet confidence - this person knows what their best work is - while a bloated one radiates anxiety.

A practical way to hold the line: once you have your kept set, look for redundancy and cut for it. If two projects make the same point about you - both show you can handle a small residential interior, say - keep the stronger and cut the other, even if the other is good, because the second one is spending a slot to repeat an argument you have already made. Aim for a set where each project earns its place by adding something the others do not: a different scale, a different skill, a different kind of thinking. That variety-with-quality is what reads as range - not sheer number.

Cutting a project from this portfolio is not deleting it or declaring it worthless - and understanding that makes the cut far easier to commit to. The work you leave out goes onto a cut list: a kept, organised set of everything that did not make this argument, ready to be used a different way. Nothing is thrown away; it is simply not in the room for this reader.

The cut list has three real uses. First, other readers. The museum competition you held back from the residential-studio application is exactly the lead piece for a design-led practice or a grad-school application that rewards intellectual ambition. You are not building one portfolio for life; you are building a body of work you re-curate for each opportunity, and the cut list is your reserve. Second, the longer version. Keep a fuller portfolio - a website, or a longer PDF - that a genuinely interested reader can go to when they want more, so your tight main portfolio never has to carry everything. The move is: lead with the short, strong version, and let the long version exist for the reader who asks. Third, the re-do pile. The strong-but-unshowable projects go here with a specific task attached - re-photograph the model in good light, re-draw the plan at portfolio line weights, shoot the finished room properly - so that next time you curate, they are ready to compete.

One honest caution as you cut: do not confuse 'I am tired of looking at this' with 'this is weak'. You have seen your own projects hundreds of times; familiarity breeds contempt, and your reader is seeing them fresh. This is where outside eyes are gold. Show your scored list and your proposed cut to someone whose judgement you trust - a tutor, a working designer, a peer - and ask them which project they would cut first and which they would lead with. You will often find that the piece you were quietly embarrassed by is the one they respond to most, and the one you were sentimentally attached to is the one they would drop. Curate with your own judgement, but pressure-test it against someone who reads like your reader will.