Titles, Captions & Credits

A project title is the first word your reader reads and the label they will use to remember you - "the one with the flood library", "the girl who did the courtyard house". Get it right and it does two jobs at once: it tells the reader what they are looking at, and it gives them a handle to carry you around in their head. Get it wrong - cryptic, precious, or missing - and you have made your reader work in the exact seconds when they are deciding whether to keep reading.

The classic mistake is the one-word poetic title that means nothing to anyone outside your own head: Liminal. Threshold. Palimpsest. Interstice. These feel meaningful when you name the project at 2am in studio, but to a stranger scanning fast they are noise. The reader cannot tell what the project is, where it is, or what type of building it might be - and a busy reader will not stop to decode it; they will simply move on, and the impression you leave is "vague".

The fix is not to abandon evocative names - a good name can add warmth and memorability - but to pair a name with a plain subtitle that does the informing. Let the name be poetic if you like, and let the subtitle carry the facts:

Threshold House
A courtyard home for three generations, Pune - 2025

Now the reader gets both: something to remember and everything they need to know. The subtitle is the workhorse; it should always answer, in a phrase, what, where, when and often for whom or at what scale. If you have to choose between a clever name and a clear subtitle, keep the subtitle every time. A project titled simply "Public Library, Kochi" is never confusing; a project titled "Osmosis" without a subtitle almost always is.

A few practical rules. Keep titles short enough to set large. Be consistent across the portfolio - if one project has a name-plus-subtitle, they all should, so the contents page reads as a considered set rather than a grab-bag. And never let the title be the only place the project is identified; the one-liner from Lesson 7.1 should reinforce it. The title's whole purpose is to stop the reader being lost for even a second. Treat it as signage, not poetry with the facts left out.

If titles are signage, captions are the tour guide - and they are the most-read words in your entire portfolio. The eye moving across a spread goes image, caption, image, caption, skipping the body text entirely; the caption is often the only sentence a reader takes in about a given drawing. That makes captions absurdly high-leverage, and it makes empty captions a wasted opportunity on every single image.

The commonest caption failure is the bare label. "Plan." "Section." "Exterior view." These tell the reader what they can already see and nothing they cannot. A good caption instead points at what to notice and why it matters - it does interpretive work the image cannot do for itself. Compare:

Weak:   Ground floor plan.
Better: Ground floor plan - every room opens onto the
        shaded central court; service rooms line the hot
        west edge as a thermal buffer.

The second version turns a drawing the reader might have skated over into evidence for your idea. It also quietly demonstrates that you understand why the plan is the way it is - which is exactly what the reader is assessing. A caption is a tiny argument: this is what you are seeing, and here is why it is good.

Some working guidance. Keep captions to one line, two at most - they are signposts, not paragraphs. Make them specific to this image, not generic ("a render of the scheme" could sit under any render). Front-load the useful word: "Long section -" then the point. Where a drawing has a scale, orientation or a key dimension that helps, include it briefly - readers trust captions that show you know your own drawing. And be honest in them: if an image is a concept sketch, a physical model or an AI-assisted render, a caption is the natural, graceful place to say so ("study model, 1:200, chipboard"; "concept render") - which we return to in Lesson 7.4.

Above all, write a caption for every image that earns its place, and make each one carry weight. If you cannot think of anything a caption could usefully add to an image, that is often a sign the image itself is not pulling its weight and might be cut. Captions are where clear writing and ruthless curation meet.

Now the part designers get wrong most often, and the part that matters most for your integrity: crediting the people you worked with. Almost no design work is truly solo. Studio projects have teammates; office projects have a whole team, a project lead and a practice whose commission it was; competitions have collaborators; even a solo academic project had a tutor who shaped it. Honest, generous crediting is not a weakness in your portfolio - it is a strength that readers actively look for, because it signals maturity, it signals you will credit them and their studio one day, and it signals you can be trusted about the harder question of what you personally did.

The principles are simple. Credit the studio or office when the work was theirs, not yours alone - "Office work at [Practice], project led by [Name]" is a normal, respectable line, not an admission of weakness. Credit collaborators by name where you can, and be specific about who did what if the work was genuinely shared. Credit your tutors on academic work; it is standard and expected, and pretending a studio project sprang from you unaided fools no one who has been to design school. Credit your photographer - architectural and interiors photographs are copyrighted by the photographer, and using them without permission and a credit is both a professional discourtesy and, often, a legal problem. If you did not take the photo, you must have permission to use it and you should name whose it is.

The hardest and most important credit is your own role, when the project was a team effort. This is where careers are quietly made or damaged, and Lesson 7.4 is devoted to it - but the rule belongs here too: state what you did, honestly and specifically, and do not let the credit imply more than is true. "Concept and plans; structural design by others" is a strong, confident line. "By [You]" on an office building you drew details for is a lie waiting to be exposed in an interview by a single follow-up question.

There is a subtlety worth naming. Under-crediting is dishonest; but so is falsely over-crediting to seem humble, or crediting a famous studio to borrow its shine when your involvement was slight. The standard is accuracy, not modesty and not inflation. Say what was yours as yours, say what was shared as shared, and say what was someone else's as theirs. A reader who sees you crediting others generously and yourself accurately will trust every other claim in your portfolio - which is worth more than any single project.

Because a portfolio holds many projects, credits work best as a small, consistent system rather than something you improvise per project. A reader should be able to find, in the same place and the same format on every project, the answers to: what type of project is this, whose was it, and what did you do? When credits appear consistently, the whole portfolio reads as trustworthy; when they are scattered, missing on some projects and buried on others, a suspicious reader starts to wonder what the gaps are hiding.

A clean, repeatable credit block - set small, in your caption typeface, tucked at the foot of a project's opening spread - does the job. A workable template:

Threshold House - Pune, 2025
Type      Private residence, 320 sq m
Context   Office work at Studio Verandah (not solo)
My role   Concept and plans; not the structural design
Team      With A. Rao (lead) and two others
Photos    (c) Priya Mehta, used with permission

Adapt the fields to the project - an academic project swaps "Office" for "Academic, Sem 7" and adds the tutor; a competition adds the result and the collaborators; a solo self-directed project can simply say so, which is itself a useful, honest signal. The point is that the shape stays the same across the portfolio, so a reader learns where to look and trusts what they find.

Keep the credit block quiet in the visual hierarchy - it should be findable, not loud. It is reference information, not a headline; small type, muted colour, consistent position. But never let "quiet" slide into "absent". The credit block is where honesty and professionalism become visible on the page, and experienced readers glance at it precisely to calibrate how much to trust the rest.

> A title tells the reader what they are looking at; a caption tells them what to notice; a credit tells them what is honestly yours. Get all three right, consistently, and your portfolio reads as the work of someone clear, generous and trustworthy - which is exactly who studios and tutors want to say yes to.