Cut-Paper Manifesto — Design Graduate Portfolio Cover
A bold portfolio cover that stacks a towering display name over a cut-paper self-portrait, with rotated discipline stickers and contact info anchored to the lower margin. Marigold ground, cobalt, and hot-pink accents telegraph art-school energy without filtering it.
This template exists to announce rather than introduce — built for the graduate who has earned the right to take up space. It refuses the restrained minimalism of corporate portfolio decks, borrowing instead from zine culture, hand-torn paper, and type posters where nothing whispers. The grid is a suggestion: sticker tags rotate freely, the portrait bleeds, and the name demands to be read from across the room. Its natural habitat is the graduate-show wall and the hiring director who has already seen a hundred tidy, forgettable PDFs.
Good for
- · Design-school graduate show opening title slides
- · Personal portfolio covers where name recognition and personality are the primary goal
- · Art-direction or illustration portfolios with a strong handmade visual identity
- · Printed broadsheet or physical portfolio book covers
Avoid for
- · Client-facing pitch decks requiring brand restraint and visual consistency
- · Chart-heavy quarterly business reviews or data presentations
- · Multi-slide decks that need a repeatable, structured interior layout
- · Academic research presentations with dense body text
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