Burn Your Portfolio: Stuff they don’t teach you in design school, but should

36. The Venus Initiative

When our agency was relatively new and growing, we felt it necessary to assess potential areas of improvement and further growth; we did this by analyzing the core components that we felt determined our success as a design company. These areas were profitability, client satisfaction, and quality of work. During these early years of our company, we were operating at over 50 percent profitability, and we had a constant stream of praise and unsolicited referrals coming from our clients. But we had never been published in a national magazine such as Communication Arts, and we had not felt ready to submit many designs for award consideration, either. While our work was certainly “good,” we wanted it to be “great,” and we determined ...