Today it is time to take a look at the next step - Typography.

The typography in the design of your architectural portfolio should be a blending of both form and function. Type has the power to communicate in tandem, or  against its message. It can be used to great effect to reinforce the style of your portfolio.

At the same time, however, there is an extent to which the type in your portfolio serves a totally utilitarian purpose. If the typography does not function, that is - communicate its message, then it has failed. Stylised type that looks great, but is illegible will generally do more harm than good to the message you present.

So the typography of your architectural portfolio must be an elegant combination of both.

You may be tempted to think that typography boils down to one thing - the font. This is far from the truth. The font (or typeface to be technical) plays a great role, but we will also look at some other attributes of typography like layout, hierarchy and attention to detail.

Typefaces - all about Style

This will usually be your first stop in laying out your architectural portfolio - which font to use. A substantial part of this decision will finds its roots in our previous discussion of style. Most of the time you are going to want your typeface to reinforce the style of your whole portfolio. Going for a sleek, modernist aesthetic? Then a geometric sans-serif like Futura might be just your type. A more refined heritage aware portfolio might use a nice elegant serif like Garamond or Baskerville.

Take a look at other designs in a similar style to your portfolio - magazines, websites, books, flyers. Is there a trend in the typeface styles used? Do they use caps or lower case? Perhaps they use a single typeface, or maybe a few paired together.

All in the family

You can find typefaces to download all over the web these days. My advice would be to be cautious about the use of freely downloaded fonts. A free "modern-space" font could come in very handy for big headlines or anything where it will get limited usage. Where these free fonts  start to lose their appeal is when you need to use them for more than a few words of text. There can often be inconsistencies and glitches that come to light when used for long sections of text.

For paragraphs of copy, or long stretches, you may be best served to use a plainer, but more fully featured font. You probably already have a few good workhouse installed by default on your computer. These fonts will have had much more time put in to them, and for various reasons will read a lot more easily over long stretches. Fonts like Helvetica, Gil Sans, Futura, Clarendon, Garamond, Baskerville, Optima and even Calibri can be good choices in this situation.

There are also more likely to a larger number of styles in the family (bold, black, italic, light etc). These can be really handy, as we will see a little later on. Free fonts from the web will not always have these variations.

Typographic Layout

Now we have our typeface selected, it's time to move on the the wider typographic layout of our architectural portfolio. These are all things related to the placement of the type and how it relates from line to line.

The first thing to consider is the measure. That's basically a special, typographer's term and refers to the width of a block of text. There are lots of rules to consider but, in the name of simplicity, here is a good tip, taken from Mark Boulton's fantastic series Five Simple Steps to Better Typography. "A general good rule of thumb is 2–3 alphabets in length, or 52–78 characters (including spaces)". The basic reason for this is to achieve a line-length where the eye is able to easily travel to the start of the next row. Too long and the eye gets lost on the way back, too short and the eye will read down rather than across - both of these making reading sub-concioulsy more difficult for the reader.

Leading and Tracking

The next things to consider for your architectural portfolio are Leading and Tracking. These are items to do with the spacing of words/characters and are sometimes referred to as line spacing and letterspacing. The main thing to bear in mind when setting your text is that the eye should be able to read smoothly along the line of text. If the gap between lines is too large, then it will be hard to see which line is next. Too close and you may jump between lines in the middle of reading. The best way to do this correctly is mostly trial and error. Try reading your text and see how difficult or easy it is - tweaking it till it is effortless.

Hierarchy

Hierarchy is very important, and can play a great role in the way your architectural portfolio communicates. Hierarchy refers to the use of type to indicate different levels of importance. Through the use of size and boldness you can indicate subconsciously to the reader, how important the part they are reading is.

The most obvious example of this is headings. A larger or bolder type will always exude more importance than a similar one that is smaller or less obvious. You can use this to guide your reader through your portfolio - highlighting important sections throughout.

For further reading on hierarchy I would highly recommend checking out Part 4 and Part 5 of Mark Boulton's fantastic Five Simple Steps to Typography .

It's all in the Details

The Final thing to consider is actually a lot of smaller points. Attention to detail with the type in the design of your architectural portfolio can make all the difference.

One thing to consider is use of apostrophes and double quotes. Many applications these days insert a symbol for these items that is simply an inches symbol, rather than the traditional "curly" quotes. In most cases you can replace them, to make sure the correct "curly quotes" show. It's true that many people may not notice, but it will add to overall professional appearance of your architectural portfolio.

Another detail to be aware of is hanging punctuation. This is most useful when blocking out quotes, or using bullet points. Most  desktop publishing programs will indent the text, keeping the punctuation (bullet, or quotes" inside the line of the text. It is actually much easier to read text when the punctuation is set outside the width of the text, so the text block is the same size. I recommend you check out Part 2 of the aforementioned Five Simple Steps to Typography.

Be careful with Bold, Italics and Small Caps

The final thing to be aware of with your architectural portfolio is a warning of sorts. Lots of applications give you commands to make text bold, italicised and in small capitals. What these commands do is create a sort of a fake bold or italics. You would do well to avoid these - instead you should use the italic or bold version of your chosen font. This is another reason why it pays to find a font with lots of variants as a part of it.

Wrapping it up

So there you have it. A few brief tips and pointers on the typography for your architectural portfolio. Keeping these in mind will helpful you immensely in creating something with a professional appearance. If you want to read some more on the subject I can highly recommend the following:

• Five Simple Steps to Better Typography
• The Elements of Typographic Style (book)
• The Elements of Typographic Style as applied to The Web

Today we will be talking about the overall styling of your portfolio.

The style in which you design and layout you architectural portfolio may seem to have little significance, but in reality it may have great impact on the way your portfolio holds together, and the way it is received. A consistent style and feel can draw together projects that might otherwise feel out of place. By framing items that are different in a common framing, you bring them all together.

The style of your portfolio could be chosen to match the style of architecture you wish to work in, or perhaps to contrast. Alternatively it may be something that is totally separate, and acts mostly to provide you with a voice to present your architectural work. Only you will be able to decide what sort of style will work for your portfolio. Lets take a look at a few different styles that could work for your architectural portfolio.

Art Deco

Should you wish, you could style your architectural portfolio to match the feel of art deco architecture and art. Art Deco was a design art movement that occurred from the 1920s to the 1940s - resulting in work that was streamlined and functional, but still elegant and glamorous.

In terms of your portfolio, this may result in straight geometric lines with smooth rounded corners; backgrounds with gradients and shade; typography that is almost showy, but still quite geometric and functional; and colour tones of rich browns and golds.

Here is a gallery of Art Deco architecture and graphic design to whet you appetite.

Modernism

Like modernism in architecture - modernism in graphic design was indicated by a return to function as a priority. The style is clean, simple and minimal, with emphasis on clear communication with frills or decoration. Typography was simple and clean, often using a single typeface for clarity (like helvetica or akzidenz grotesk). Imagery was almost always a simple photograph or illustration, integrated with the type to help communicate the main theme or idea. There was great use of angles and shape to make a dynamic image with very little.

Here is a great selection of Modernist graphic design for you to flick through.

Post- Modernism

Post-modernism was a breaking away from the modernist principles that happened around the 1960s. It saw a return of creativity and ornamentation to the design process - often seeking to deliberately shy away from the simplicity and functionality that modernism had brought.

Post-modernism seeks out inspiration from all sources, and can often involve imagery or type that doesn't seem immediately to fit. Collage was often used, and this was were you first started to see the "punk" and diy aesthetic of cutting and pasting items in a rough fashion.

There are certainly lots of options - almost too many, but it opens a lot of possibilities for how you might style your architectural portfolio. This site has an interesting mix of imagery that fits in the area of post-modernism.

Deconstructivism

The next step from post-modernism was for things to be stuff to start being deconstructed. In the design world, grunge took over as a dominant style as things got messier and harder to read. Images and type were overlapped - typography had less defined forms and was about feel and emotion rather than readability.

This style could work to your advantage, but you must be careful that what you are communicating is clear - the last thing you want to do is make life difficult for someone reading your portfolio.

These are only a few of the styles you might choose to adopt for your portfolio. The important thing to remember is that a cohesive style can help your portfolio hold together as a unit, and communicate more effectively to whoever is reading it.

I hope this instalment has been helpful - in our next post we will look at the imagery involved in your architectural portfolio, and how to use it.

So let's get cracking on part 1 - Taking Aim.

Before we even start to think about design or layout we're going to take a step back and take stock. Let's have a think about the aims and goals for this architectural portfolio of yours. We could jump straight into the fun stuff, but I want to encourage you to take a bit of time to look at the big picture.

Finding Your Target

The first step is to have a think about WHO your portfolio is for. At the end of the day your architectural portfolio has to appeal to someone other than yourself. This puts you in a bit of a pickle. It's easy to know what you would want to see in a portfolio, but it turns out that isn't so important. The key is that it appeals to the person you are showing it to.

So who might the target for your portfolio be? If you're recently graduating then chances are your target is going to be prospective employers, or possibly graduate school. What about the different firms you would like to work at? There's also the chance that you might be trying to target clients directly with your work, so that could be worth considering. Have a think about  yourself, and who it is you will be trying to show your architectural portfolio to. Write out a list of prospective targets for your portfolio.

Feet in Someone Else's Shoes

Now we have an idea of who we are targeting we need to try something that may be a little unfamiliar. We need to figure out what sorts of things your target market might be looking for in an architectural portfolio. Take a few minutes to jot down some ideas of what each of your "targets" would see as important in a portfolio of work. Maybe they would place priority on variety of work, or quality of documentation. Perhaps they will be most impressed by innovation and wild new ideas. For different firms - maybe they are most interested in the style of work they do themselves.

Once you've taken some time to think this through, you should have a few points jotted down that will help you to know what your architectural portfolio should be like.

Picking and Choosing

The information you have gathered so far about the targets for your portfolio, and what they are looking for, are valuable in a couple of ways.

Firstly, you can use that information to help you with selection of projects for your portfolio. You will doubtless have a handful of work to choose from when putting things together, and the key is that you can't use everything. There will be projects that fit with what you are trying to show your targets, and doubtless there will be projects that fall outside that.

One of the hardest things to do with your architectural portfolio at this point is be objective. That project which is your pride and joy? The one you slaved over, and documented carefully, constructing painstaking models to much acclaim? It might not be what your target wants to see.

It probably will be (after all, high quality work is always an asset), but it might be nothing like what would impress them. You need to be willing to think objectively about your work, and which projects are going to best present you to your target.

Taste and Style

Another way the information about your target can come in handy is in deciding the style and look of your architectural portfolio. Different targets may well have different expectations of how your portfolio will look and be presented. A portfolio that looks timeless and elegant might not be so appealing to firms that specialise in new, modern, ground breaking designs - and vice versa.

Have a look at the way your targets present themselves. This can often (though not always) be a strong indicator of what they will be looking for in an architectural portfolio for a prospective employee.

Take some time and scribble down some thoughts on the way your targets might like you to present your work visually.

Be Flexible

After all the work you have put into thinking about your targets and what they want this might be a bit disappointing - but the key is to remain flexible. In terms of your different projects, it may be wise to have more projects covered in your architectural portfolio than you want to show at one time.

That way when you go to a meeting or an interview, you can select the pieces that most suit the particular person you are meeting. This can mean some extra work, and remaining flexible can sometime be worth it. However the reality is that one size never fits all. It pays to be able to customise a little bit.

So What Now?

Well, you have finished thinking about the target for you architectural portfolio, and what that is going to mean. We've taken the first step.

In the next installment of Architectural Portfolio Tips we'll be taking a look at style and theming of your portfolio. Stay tuned.

There is a lot that can go wrong, but plenty you can do to ensure it all works well.

Coming from a graphic design background, I often look at student architectural  portfolios that I see, and notice some fairly regular areas where improvement can be made. Over the next few weeks on Design+Build we will be featuring a number of articles discussing different aspects of architectural portfolio design, and providing some helpful tips and hints.

We'll cover some graphic design fundamentals like grid and layout, typography, colour and pacing, and see how they might relate to the design and production of a student's architectural portfolio. Hopefully these will come to be a helpful resource to students, and non-students alike.

Stay tuned for more...