portfolio center
Portfolio Center is, well, underwhelming at first glance. Tucked away after a row of antique stores, the grey warehouse-ish building seems weathered and smaller than expected. A simple black awning lets you know that yes, this is the Portfolio Center that you drove ten hours south to visit. The only other distinguishing exterior features are a few trees, a small porch with benches, and three banners that read "Live to Learn."
Inside the double doors, away from a hot Atlanta (not Hotlanta) Monday morning, a modern reception area is complimented with display cases and framed student work. Fernando, the admissions guy, introduced himself and poured coffee (that's right, I just changed tenses for those of you keeping score at home). Before I move on, let me say that Fernando is the man. So Fernando begins to explain some of the stories behind the student work on display. There's a scale model of a Virgin Megastore. Wine bottles with labels and the packaging they come in. Model airplanes and trucks, banners, and press passes for the Olympics - each emblazoned with personalized logos. Several artsy chairs. Magazine ads, paintings, photos, boxes, corporate logos, book covers, stationery and even a juicer for oranges. This is what you do here; these are your graded projects. I'm probably not doing justice to how professional and perfect everything looked.
I sat in on two classes. The small, student-centered discussions were led by instructors from the advertising design industry. One class was given the assignment to basically reinvent a company image. One girl was talking about Baskin-Robbins and how desperately they were in need of a change. She shared some of her research about how the 31 flavors used to correspond to the days of the month and how there have been so many special limited-time flavors over the years. The instructor left the room for a second and came back with some Baskin-Robbins postcards that a student had created for another class a few years ago. She had focused on the iconic pink plastic spoon and placed it in familiar pictures, like Sean Connery's James Bond holding the pink spoon instead of a gun (which also celebrated an old limited-time "0013 Secret Flavor"). The other class was just as interesting. Both seemed to revolve around students sharing their work and spending the bulk of the time critiquing and learning from each other.
A recent UVA grad joined Fernando and I for lunch and answered a lot of questions that I had. Afterwards, she showed me her walking-distance apartment, which I was immediately sold on. The spacious rooms and the surrounding grass and trees made it seem like a hidden neighborhood inside the city, but the outdoor swimming pool and the free laundry service really hooked me. If you know about my laundry habits, you're probably wondering why I didn't sign a lease right then and there.
But then I went back to the school and met with the president, Hank Richardson. He shut the door and we talked for an hour about anything and everything. I showed him the portfolio section of this website. He showed me a DVD about the PC students. Even after the hundreds of things that already impressed me that day, his attitude and excitement were contagious. He warned that it wouldn't be easy and that I'd be working extremely hard during school and into whatever career direction school would take me. But it was easy to see that I would be enjoying every second of it, constantly challenging myself and working on exciting projects. Hank's big-picture mentality was essentially that he wanted to get the most out of life, living by a "you can sleep when you die" mantra. And PC grads are working everywhere from Martha Stewart Living to Pentagram to MTV (and MTV Asia) to Hallmark to Victoria's Secret to Microsoft to Abercrombie and Fitch (designing ads, not folding clothes or pre-fraying hats) to Disney to starting up their own companies and design agencies. You know that whole UPS "what can brown do for you?" campaign or the Volkswagen "oops we returned the wrong video" ad? The possibilites of this kind of a post-graduate career are racing through my overstimulated imagination. This guy Hank is absolutely incredible, and he even teaches one of the "rite of passage" classes - a 5:30 AM design theory class where you create a chair from concept to final product. Hank was the one that made me so excited when I saw Portfolio Center's presentation at UVA, and a long year later, that much-needed excitement exploded inside of me again.
So it's official. I'm leaving Teach For America and Baltimore City Public Schools after this school year and will be attending Portfolio Center in Atlanta, Georgia in the fall.
Tuesday, April 15 at 9:55 PM
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