One project, four presentations

August 23rd, 2026

Zines are a portable way to showcase a project you're working on, or help a non-designer understand what industrial design is a little bit. I created a bunch of zines about the toaster + salamander (and a few other projects) to give out to other industrial designers. Nobody really cared about the project itself. Instead, the average response was, "I need to start making these".

As I was finishing the toaster + salamander, I was simultaneously creating a poster for it and two other projects. Limited information could be shown, and I also had to make it consistent across all three projects. This thing was going be hung up in a hallway for a while, so I wanted it to look impressive I guess.

When creating a portfolio, you are supposed to find balance between explaining everything while also being concise so a potential employer can skim through it pretty quickly to move on to the 1,000 applicants that applied for such job. I don't think it has to be as glamorous and monumental as the poster, so you can include a couple Blender screenshots to show that you're a little quirky.

My website can be a little bit less serious. Actually, it can be whatever I want, but I ended up doing almost the same exact thing as my portfolio. The text is larger compared to the images, so maybe someone might actually read it. This website is actually just a design project that includes a blog post that discusses different design projects that present a design project.

I was a graphic design major in college and eventually switched to industrial design for a number of a reasons. I don't think the graphic design part of myself will go away though. Now that I do industrial design, I wish I could do more graphic design. The grass is always greener or something like that. Each one of these four projects that I am using to display one project is actually just an excuse to do graphic design again. I looked forward to creating that big poster. The zines allowed me try ideas that I felt wouldn't work in a portfolio. This website was actually just me wanting to learn html and css.

Each time I revisit graphic design, I am humbled. It is not a skill that an industrial designer can just also do. Industrial design majors claiming that their major includes the graphic design major is just incorrect and leads to some insecurity within the graphic design world. After I switched majors, someone said to me, "Don't you wish you could go back to just pinning things up on a wall".