Once upon a time, maintaining your portfolio meant taking hard copies to an interview or attaching them with your application. However, today most publishing employers prefer portfolio websites so they don’t have to worry about hanging on to (or worse, losing) the multitudes of work they receive from each candidate. But those of you who haven’t spent much time coding or building websites are likely wondering: Where do I begin? Well, look no further. Here are some tips to get you started.
Design
It’s Pub Year: Now What?
By Sarah Loepp
What are some key elements of the final stages of book publication? I’ll take you through the main projects our team is working on at this stage, and give you a peek into the happenings at a publisher leading up to a book’s release.
Designs of the Future and Beyond: 2018 Sci-Fi Book Cover Trends
By Megan Crayne Beall @megancraynepoet
I refuse to believe we can’t move past the paperback designs of the past with their jumble of chunky fonts, strange color palettes, and, dare I say, unappealing illustrations of aliens.
Elements of a Good Horror Cover
By Hazel Wright
I remember, at age eleven, seeing a copy of Lois Duncan’s 1976 young adult horror novel Summer of Fear featuring its original cover art at the Multnomah County Library and knowing immediately that I had to read it. And it wasn’t because I enjoyed the cover design; it was because I could barely look at it.
Putting Design into Perspective: Book Design as a Rhetorical Situation
By Jenny Kimura
No matter how brilliant a piece of writing is, if it doesn’t know who the audience should be or doesn’t give enough context about its subject, the writing fails to be read, understood, and shared. It fails to communicate. The same holds true for book design.
Gendered Book Covers and Why Boys Read Less than Girls
By Sydnee Chesley
In 2016, Scholastic conducted a survey on over two thousand US children ages six to seventeen and found that when it came to reading, boys generally do not like it as much as girls do.