I was invited to join a panel to judge the portfolios of new grads from the 2 year “Game Art & Design” program at the Art Institute of Toronto. I have mixed feelings about the focus of this program. Obviously its meant to produce students who are only geared towards game design and not the design industry at large.

We were presented with four students and learned that they had many of the soft (concepts, communication, attitude) and hard ( 3d modeling, photoshop) skills that could make them decent designers in both game and web design.

There were 5 judges on the panel from different companies directly and indirectly related to the game industry. I do not work for a game company but work with game clients as well as a variety of other clients. When I was 19, I dreamed of working in the game industry, and was able to translate that passion towards the web. I discovered that I could steal from game concepts and weave them into web design.

Every student ended their presentation with the same question: “What do you expect of me?”

I wanted to see a collection of mostly process work and only a couple finished pieces. This process work could include:

• storyboards
• concept art
• written story
• sketches
• low poly model
• textures
• list all the sofware and tools involved
• photography (locations and macro textures)
• moodboards

As a game design program, I was a little disappointed to see only pure art and not any game interfaces, stories or puzzle concepts.

I’ll share one student’s portfolio site: www.joefortin.com. He was the only one who had an online portfolio, and I liked all the detail work he put into his illustrations. He’s nearly ready to do the box art for a game company like Square Enix or Atlus.