Revision, Expression 
& Portfolio Design


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Cartoon Set


A portfolio is a designed object.  Whether it is printed or digital, the portfolio is a formatted interface that communicates to an audience via images, text, and perhaps hyperlinks to external files.  A “cartoon set” allows you to explore the sequence of images and consider their relation in advance of finalizing or developing them.  This exercise allows you to consider the narrative flow of images to determine what elements of the story each image should convey.   


Joseph Muller-Brockmann, Grid Systems in Graphic Design, 1961.  

These cartoon sets help you gather your work into a format that can be reviewed and discussed, and to identify existing images that might need to be reworked or new images the might need to be developed.  In this way, the cartoon set is also a way to organize work to be completed, and assists you with scheduling your effort over the course of the quarter. 

Folio Cartoon Set


  1. Who is the intended audience for this document?

    Is it for you? What is your interest?  For example, are you using this as a feedback loop to take stock of your own work and see if any themes emerge?

    Is it for an outside audience? For example, are you using the folio to support an application to a graduate school, to a professional practice or office, to a gallerist, for a grant, for a conference? 

  2. Given the audience, what messages are the priority.  For example, what content is necessary to establish the minimum viable prototype for feedback from that audience.

  3. Collect all of your previous work. 

  4. How many projects should you include?  Is there work you are including or excluding, and what is your criteria?

  5. Choose a format. e.g. ISO A3, ISO A4, ISO A5, 7x7, 5x5, 16:10, etc.  

  6. In that format, sketch the sequence, size, and relation between images of each project.  These sketches can be schematic -- i.e. they can be frames containing notes about content or techniques, schematics, or representative images if you have them.  This can be done by sketching on paper, by printing and collaging and pasting onto paper, or using software like InDesign.

    Project Cartoon Set(s)


    The arrangement of images and text can establish visual relationships between various strands of information or processes of development.  In that way a project’s layout can have an implied or explicit narrative structure that creates relationships between different viewpoints, different scales, different temporal frames, or different modes of thought or design.  For example it can relate:

    1. Why?
      What observations (via documentation) informed your motivation for the project.  Was there a philosophical, pedagogical, ecological, humanitarian, aesthetic or other series of questions that inspired your approach to the project.  Did you establish criteria to evaluate the work? Are there diagrams or other conceptual drawings that communicate this?  

    2. What?
      What are the “active ingredients” of the project?  What mediums, objects, materials, etc. give the form of the project its agency.  Is the work intended to be complete and self-contained?   Is it intended to be resolved, experimental, a didactic model, or an open framework for you or others to engage?

    3. How?
      How have you (or might you) developed the project’s active ingredients, independently and in relation, to accomplish something?  What tactics, processes, permutations, iterations, controls, techniques or technologies have you engaged or created to assist with development?  What images, drawings, or other objects of development should you include to communicate the way the project has been conceived?


    Formats