The organization and design of your portfolio should reflect your writing goals and your readers’ expectations. If you are submitting work for an assessment portfolio that your college has required you to complete, you might have few options when it comes to organization and design. You’ll simply be following a template. If you are working on a class project, you might have more freedom, but you’ll certainly want to review the assignment carefully for guidance about organization and design. In contrast, if you are working on a personal portfolio, your decisions will be guided by your goals for the project and your awareness of your readers’ needs and interests, the time they are likely to put into reading your work, and their technological sophistication. It might be tempting, for example, to upload a folder filled with HTML files to DropBox, iCloud, or SkyDrive, but you should do so only if you are sure your readers will be able to access the files and open them with a Web browser.

As you organize and design your portfolio, keep the principles of simplicity and consistency in mind. You should choose a single organizing pattern, such as chronology or definition (see Chapter 15), that allows you to accomplish your goals and that your readers will find reasonable. You should also develop a consistent look and feel for your portfolio, focusing in particular on issues such as color and font scheme, page layout, and navigation tools. It is likely, of course, that the individual documents in your portfolio will have their own distinctive designs. Readers will expect this, and if the design of these documents is essential to their effect you should not redesign them. However, if you are working with a set of essays in which your design decisions are less important than what you’ve written, you might consider reformatting them so that they follow the design you’ve chosen for the portfolio as a whole.

You should also spend some time thinking about how your readers will work with your portfolio. If you are creating a print portfolio, you might use a table of contents to help readers see how your portfolio is organized. You might also attach colored tabs to pages to help readers find the start of each document. If you are creating an e-Portfolio, you might think about providing navigation tools, such as tables of contents and menus, and about using hyperlinks to help readers move from one part of the e-Portfolio to another.

Your design decisions should help your readers work easily and quickly with the materials you’ve included in your portfolio. In general, simple, uncluttered designs that use readable fonts and consistent colors will allow your readers to view your portfolio without distraction.