Application advice

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A portfolio is a collection of personal work that you have done over the previous year or previous years. It's a representation of who you are as a practitioner, the way that you think, and the way that you put ideas together.

With your portfolio when you show us what you can do it's an opportunity for us to understand what potential have, and it shows us your interests, and that's why we need those. We need to see who you are as a maker or creator.

A portfolio is a window into your own unique world through which we can see your skills, your potential, and your lived experience.

Portfolios are not just fine art and fashion. Portfolios are for multimedia, they are for digital, they are showing us how you communicate visually.

Previously, at Yale, we used to ask students to bring a physical portfolio and they will be asked to show the portfolio and talk through it. We've since shifted to PebblePad, our online portfolio tool, and this is a replacement for that technique.

Even though we've moved from physical portfolios to digital portfolios, the important thing is you. It's about your work, your creative expression, your aspirations, and that's what we want to capture, and that has not changed.

Before you prepare your digital portfolio, please check the course page. One of the reasons is it will have guidance for you, advice, things that you might want to include to give us an understanding of your desire and appetite for the discipline you're applying for.

It is super important to show a range of work in your portfolio because when you come to university, you will be given projects that are diverse.

So my portfolio is very mixed. I had a lot of art and design photography, graphics, digital design, but then also physical making.

We don't mind if you video a physical portfolio, we also don't mind if you share an incredible digital drawing. Equally maybe you've done this incredible shoot or you've done something creative in a space and you've managed to take great photos.

It was making sure that the process was very clear and it was not centred around finished works, it was all about the ideas and how they bounced off each other. And I remember being really passionate about including things that didn't go right.

If you as a performer of performing students you've done any performance in your current course or in your work experience show us, tell us.

When we look at a portfolio, we are obviously looking at a certain amount of technical ability, but we are looking about how people think, we're also looking about how people experiment, how people will take risks or try things. You often learn more from things that don't succeed than the things that do.

Storytelling in a portfolio is very important, like any aspect of design there's a narrative. So if you can to the best of your ability, each project you can have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

It's a little bit like a DJ set. You don't want to play all your best stuff at the beginning and you don't want to play all the best stuff at the end. The idea is that you tend to start with something strong, finish with something strong, and then try to even the rest of the work out so there is an undulating pattern of up and down.

You don't want your portfolio to be the exact same as the person next to you. You want it to talk about you, your methods, why you took up a personal project if you have any in your portfolio.

We're looking for the possibilities of growth for someone to come to us and leave us being more than they were when they arrived.

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