Planning your portfolio in InDesign

Conference season is in the air, so I thought I’d show you a quick way to plan out your physical portfolio using InDesign and Acrobat. I have to credit Tracy Bishop for this tip. I don’t know about you, but I wasted a lot of ink and paper before I figured this method out. Doh!


In my last post I showed you how I organize my picture book dummies using InDesign. Planning a portfolio is pretty much the same process. I open a new document in InDesign creating pages the same size as my physical portfolio. For more details, check my last post here.image

As you can see, I figured out how many pages I wanted and have placed my art already. It’s really easy to click and drag the pages in the page menu to rearrange them. I can decide whether to leave blank pages or to group related pictures together. I can also figure out how big each image should be.

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Once I have the art the size I want, I can click on each image to see what size it is and print it at that size in Photoshop. Easy peasy.

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You can also export this as a pdf and load it on your iPad or other tablet. 

Here’s my portfolio (for now). I’m using an 11×14 Kolo album. It’s an inch too wide for the SCBWI National Conference this summer in Los Angeles, but I wanted my art as big as possible. I’ll have to figure out something else soon.

With the Kolo album, you can get pages that you can print directly on. My printer doesn’t cooperate, but maybe yours does. I print my images on Epson Ultra Premium Photo Paper Luster and mount it on the portfolio pages using StudioTac. Tracy also introduced me to StudioTac. I use the low tack version so that I am able to reposition things if necessary. It’s so easy to use! You just put your image on it, burnish over the image, then adhere it to the page in your portfolio.


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I wanted my name on the portfolio, so here’s what I used as page one.

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I consulted this post by Molly Idle to figure out the look of my portfolio. I like that she’s creating a portfolio that feels like a real book.



04/25/2013 | Uncategorized | 0 Comments

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