Portfolio presentation II

I announced the results from my portfolio survey too soon. It turns out I'd only looked at about half of them. I found some more at the bottom of the stack, under some blanks.
The final results are, from most popular to least:
1. Seurat
2. Oz
3. Grackle
4. Grad Card
5. Calendar Snake
6 (Tie) Photoshop House, Rudolph
8. Los Muertos
9. (Tie) Ethics Chess, FiloSofia
11. Protesters
12. Chupacabra

I take three things from this:

1. I ought to drop Protesters and Chupacabra from the portfolio. They finished in the bottom two by a sizable margin.

2. For PowerPoint presentations, simple and clean trumps complex. The top four are all relatively simple compared to 5 through 9. (I would put Rudolph in the simple category, though). Photoshop House was 20 times more difficult than Seurat. But I think pieces like PS House and FiloSofia have details that are hard to see on a projector screen. Also the survey group only had about 15 seconds to look at and comment on each slide. Again, I think that favors the simpler, cleaner works.

3. It helps if you can show steps involved in the process. If I'd shown Seurat on it's own, it wouldn't have worked as well. But by showing the original painting and the original photo of the girl I inserted in the painting, it guided the viewers through the process. That can't be done with every work, but it's something to keep in mind.

Ethics Chess drew the most diverse comments. Some picked it as their favorite. Some picked it as their least favorite.

Last week, I finished a Butterfield Stage map and a how-to on how to hit a golf ball from a sand trap. I think they are both portfolio-worthy, especially given Matt's comments about demand for informational graphics.