To forget what you know for a moment, to think like a child, is a wonderful, productive form of freedom, and the freedom to play leads to a revival of the imagination. At Portfolio Center students work hard, but they also have fun with their projects and, later, in their work and in their lives. Play stimulates them to cope with the problems of form and content, to weigh relationships, to establish priorities, and to create stories.

Legendary designer and art director Paul Rand wisely stated, “Without play, there would be no Picasso.”

Admittedly, aesthetics is an important question within any design issue, but it is never the most crucial one. Design isn’t about pretty, after all, and branding isn’t about cool. It is all about telling stories, and the emotions those stories evoke.

Hank Richardson, president of Portfolio Center, is quick to remind students, “The best fiction is always personal.” And after two years at Portfolio Center, students don’t have any secrets left to tell, so often do they draw from their own stories, mores, and ethics to create work that is distinctive—driven by their own experience, expressed in their own particular voices.

Every design and advertising student at Portfolio Center is required to take creative writing, concentrating on the power of written imagery, and everyone takes photography, wherein they invent visual narratives. At Portfolio Center, they’ve got “story” covered. As business author Tom Peters says, “He who tells the best story wins.”

The school is small, intimate, the best possible kind of place to produce Renaissance creatives in a Bauhaus world. Those at the school know that good instructors work through a sense of imagination to help students find their own voices, and to find those voices, students have to take risks. Portfolio Center provides excellent mentors, then makes sure everyone is in a safe, supportive atmosphere that encourages the risks necessary for growth.

They’ve created an environment that promotes play, in the form of individual expression and experimentation. But while they’re pushing students to explore, to go to the edge of the cliff, they are also emphasizing the brass tacks of “work” and “craft,” always reminding them of Emile Zola’s maxim, “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without the work.” Students put the Portfolio Center philosophy to work every day, some as early as 5 a.m., when Richardson holds his classes.

ASHLEA POWELL, WRITING
After studying business and Spanish at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Ashlea Powell worked in management consulting for two long years. “I managed to escape,” she says, “just before it sucked all the life out of me.” She considered getting a master’s in journalism, but after visiting Portfolio Center, she realized her true calling. When asked what she feels is the most important thing she’s learned in the past year, Powell answers, “The belief that I can create anything I can imagine.”

Powell’s T-Mobile Text Messaging project was produced for her Brand Strategy class. She teamed up with Mark Sikes to highlight T-Mobile’s global presence. They set out to create a viral campaign to demonstrate the unique relationships and stories that text messaging creates. She explains, “Using scrolling billboards that allow people to submit their own text messages for display at international cities and airports, we used ambient media to inspire people to ‘spread love’ through text messaging.”

DAVE WERNER, DESIGN
Dave Werner graduated from the University of Virginia with a double major in music and English. Idealistic and hungry for a challenge, he joined Teach for America and taught language arts to middle school students in inner-city Baltimore. The job turned out to be downright dangerous, though, and he quit after he was physically assaulted. Sympathetic friends suggested Portfolio Center, telling him it was a “Dave type of grad school.” Werner says of his experience there, “The school refuses to accept ‘impossible’ as an excuse. Where else could I have made a 200-pound metal chair while simultaneously creating a television commercial and a museum exhibit?”

Werner’s project began in Richardson’s infamous, predawn History of Design class, where, this time, students were challenged to create an experimental book. The hyper-condensed version of his concept: Drawing on Modernism’s applications and his research regarding everyday design, Werner took his own experiences as an avid video game player in the ’80s and ’90s and his childhood love of Choose Your Own Adventure books and created Cadence of Seasons. According to Werner, “The tale deals with animals in the tradition of Watership Down or Brian Jacque’s Redwall series. The interactive event fits the definition of multimedia well, combining elements of movies, books, video games, and music into a single entertaining story.”