The Work Of
Despite having no experience working leather, I decided to make a leather bound portfolio and figure it out along the way. Michael's supplied the raw materials, and I set out on Illustrator to make something new.
The prompt
As the culmination of my PDI Studio Three course, we were tasked to craft a physical portfolio for two purposes: to get us thinking about how to present our work, and to have a physical representation of that work for use during career fairs and the like.
I decided the best approach was to make a portfolio that was a portfolio piece in and of itself. What speaks professionalism better than leather?
the process
Beginning with the notion of making a leather bound portfolio, I first began working on each piece in template form. I started with a standard approach, bar on top and bar on bottom to constrain the content with color coding specific to each articles segment. It was boring, and I quickly moved on.
The next attempt was still bar incorporating, but I decided to mess around with a gradient map along the top bar. It was visually more attractive, but also too cluttered, so I cut out the fluff and maintained the gradient mapping for the header color, and added in a color guide as a page number identifier
The next step was to prepare my leather for cutting and sewing. I wanted the cover to have an embossed look, so I utilized a color variation in Illustrator that I could use to assign different cutting patterns on the laser cutter.
To get the straightest sewn line possible, I again used illustrator to align all my thread holes as well as map the strapping pieces from an extra leather piece.
the result
A number of wasted leather pieces, a few lessons in leather tolerancing, and innumerable needle sticks later, I had a complete portfolio. Each section was color coded, with double justified text to break columns on the page.
I curated a number of projects, while others were left with ipsum filler to be addressed at a later date (acceptable per the prompt). The final product needs a little more work, and may be completely remade as the stitching on front and back should have been 4 sided (as opposed to three, see below) in my opinion, and likely wont be presented until that time.
