Stand Out (PDF)

The design marketplace has never been more competitive, or demanded more from emerging talent. To succeed, you must navigate the transition from learner to professional with purpose and precision. In Stand Out: Building Your Design Portfolio, Denise Anderson offers a hands-on, three-step, full-color action plan for establishing your unique brand, crafting a killer portfolio, tailoring and delivering your message, getting your perfect design job, and excelling once you're hired.

In this superbly organized and beautifully designed book, Anderson distills 20+ years of experience as a graphic designer, entrepreneur, instructor, and mentor, offering you powerful insights and easy-to-use tools for successfully launching your career. Whether you're in graphic design, advertising design, interactive or web design, fashion, or any other design field, Anderson will help you identify what makes you unique, and use it powerfully differentiate yourself from everyone else. Stand Out's step-by-step approach, hands-on work exercises, and short, easy-to-absorb chapters guide you through:

• Clarifying your brand purpose and unique attributes
• Designing your brand identity, encompassing all brand touchpoints
• Creating an online presence that showcases you at your best
• Self-promoting your brand, from social media to print "leave-behinds"
• Optimizing your portfolio for the industry and company where you want to work
• Discovering what's hot in portfolio design and strategy - and what's not
• Understanding what employers want from you
• Producing your digital and/or print portfolio
• Choosing your mentor(s) and creating your personal advisory board
• Developing a personal job plan you can start executing right now
• Protecting your work against theft
• Identifying your dream job
• Writing and designing outstanding resumes and job-specific cover letters
• Interviewing and presenting your work effectively
• Accepting a position and negotiating salary
• Succeeding in your first job, and preparing for the next

Stand Out brings together all the easy-to-use forms, checklists, and tools you'll need... multiple examples of great student and young professional portfolio work to show you how it's done... dozens of great tips and tricks... "in the trenches" insights from recent graduates... all you need to get where you want to go!