Portfolio guidance: Design and Creative Arts (PGT)

Welcome to the School of Design and Creative Art guide to portfolios. We want to see your work at its most beautiful, and to discover how good you are.

A design portfolio is a visual showcase of your abilities. It helps us understand your creative thinking, skills, and design journey so far. Think of it as your opportunity to tell your story through your work.

An effective portfolio showcases your design craft skills, ability to engage with diverse users and technologies, and your creative approach to design and decision-making. As such, no two portfolios should be the same.

Your portfolio will be assessed by our panel of experienced academic staff as part of the admissions process.

Be selective on what you show. Don’t include everything.

Open your portfolio with your strongest project, not necessarily in the order they were completed. For example, if you’re applying to study Graphic Design, then start with your best piece of Graphic Design work.

There are thousands of different ways to make a portfolio.

We’re looking for evidence that you will work hard and perform to a high level.

As a top-ranked Art and Design School, we’re fostering future leaders and want to see if that may be you.

Focus on showing how excellent you are more than following a set formula.

Include your full name: e.g., Xiaoli Tian. 

The front cover should be both: 

1. Aesthetically attractive.
2. Represent what we will find inside.

We care about your work and want a good match between the outside and the inside. 

The cover sets us up for the work to come.

Whatever software you choose to author your portfolio, we ask that you send us your work as a PDF file. We ask this because:

1. The PDF file will keep your design - the fonts, the colours and the images - looking like they do on your device, regardless of the computing device we are looking at your work on.
2. A PDF will properly save your URLs/Links and media internally.
3. A PDF allows you to set the compression of your files so that you can meet our file size requirements, while not doing damage to your images and other media content.

Authoring software that works:

Microsoft PowerPoint, LibreOffice Presenter (Free), Apple Keynote (Free on MacOS), Figma, Adobe InDesign, Canva Affinity (Free with a free Canva account).

Figma

Canva

LibreOffice  

File size = no more than 15 MB 

File type = PDF 

Name your file clearly, in this way: Portfolio - Family name, Chosen name.pdf. E.g., Portfolio - Tian, Xiaoli.pdf  

• 1000x5000px image
• A 72pt Headline
• 48pt body text
• 25pt small text

We would suggest that you present your work as sets of individual screens or pages formatted at either QHD 1440p or FHD1080p sizes.

Make sure that your text is large enough to be read.

Make sure that any links or URLs are presented as live text that can be selected so that we can view the linked media.

• QHD 1440p = 2560 x 1440px
• FHD 1080p = 1920 x 1080px

Create your portfolio with two screens side by side, or just one single screen — no more. 
 
If you put four or more A3 pages on one screen, your work becomes very hard to read. It also makes it hard for us to decide whether to offer you a place.

3 to 5 case studies or projects max

Between 3 and 5 (maximum) case studies or projects show your range of skills and your appropriateness for our Programmes here at Loughborough University School of Design and Creative Arts.

• Less than 3 case studies suggests you may not be ready for a Master’s study.
• More than 3 case studies suggests that you can’t decide which of your work is important, and which isn’t.

We suggest that you include 10 to 20 pages of work total. Show us quality over quantity.

Go into as much detail as possible. If you don’t write about it, then we can’t know about it.

• Talk to us on the page!
• What was the problem you’re addressing?
• Why is that problem important?
• How did you address the problem?
• Visualise the final outcome?
• Reflect on if you solved the problem?

Contextual opportunity

1. Your Project Title 
2. A short introduction to the project and the programme it came from (e.g. BSc. Human Factor Design). 
3. Your personal definition of the brief/problem and the user/context. 
4. Evidence of the research you carried out and the key insights that you have discovered.

The design process

1. Rough ideation sketches. 
2. Analogue or digital developmental sketches 
3. Digital modelling and/or physical prototype exploration 

The final design in use

1. A ‘hero’ image of the proposed product and the key features 
2. Product in use showing how the final design works and/or how the user interacts with it. 
3. Final functional testing and/ or user evaluation

Tell us the current news and cultural context that makes your work relevant. This could be: analysis of existing designs, art shows, films, social media or reports. 

This collected information should be backed up with proper academic citations.

Citing the research shows you understand how academic thinking works and that you care about detail. 

Learn how to cite your work properly with a range of resources from Loughborough University Library.

Be open about your work.

Tell us which part of the work you are presenting is your own work, and which is a group project. You are welcome to include group work in your portfolio, but we need to clearly see what your contribution to the project is. Add a text box at the front of the case study explaining what you did. 

You can include case studies of work you have created during employment or internships.

They may only be one or two pages long, but they are excellent to show your real-world skills.

If it’s too small, we cannot see your work!

Review your Portfolio PDF on a laptop before you submit it. If you cannot read it on a smaller screen, then neither can we.

• Your picture should be clear. Your text should be readable.
• If your picture is over-compressed, your work will look weak.
• If your pictures are fuzzy/ pixelated, then we cannot see what is going on.
• If the picture is too small to see what is going on, then we can’t understand it and will ignore it.

English makes no sense, but it is the tool we work with.

Run the spell checker in whichever software you’re building your portfolio in. 

• We understand that English spelling can be difficult.
• However, spell checkers are excellent and built into your software.
• Spelling mistakes in your portfolio make you look bad.

Good (be honest)

If you use AI in your case studies, we want to know:

• Which AI
• Why you used it
• How you used it
• What you learnt from using it

While AI can be a powerful tool for designers, ensure you are in charge of the critical thinking and decision-making. If you use AI, cite it, include your prompts, and explain how it formed part of your design process.

Bad (be VERY honest)

Generative AI has a slightly ‘strange’ writing style, and we can tell (especially if your IELTS score is low and your cover letter uses complex English). 

Just be yourself; we want to know you.

We will judge obviously AI-generated (and not explained) work poorly when we review your portfolio. Applicants who submit a series of AI-generated case studies will be rejected.

Show your success.

Include any competition work in your portfolio. Show the final work! Entering competitions is valuable because it shows: 

• External recognition of your ability
• Motivation and passion for your chosen design or creative field
• Engagement beyond classroom learning

This helps us understand your commitment to the profession and your drive to grow as a designer or creative practitioner.