It’s a competitive marketplace out there. Fully realizing this, Sweden’s Liza Pedersen, fresh out of design school, has hit the ground running with a self-promo kit perfectly crafted for getting her foot in the door at her agency of choice. And she created it all without setting foot inside a print shop! “As a young designer in the beginning of my career,” she tells PaperSpecs, “I wanted to promote myself and be remembered, but also incorporate my personal interest with graphic design.”
The package arrives at the desk of her potential employer like this – a small, plain white (and hand-assembled) box inside a black sleeve, fully stating her intentions:
“I am a 24 year old packaging enthusiast with a passion for concept development & identities and I would love to work with you! Thanks in advance!”
Sliding off the sleeve and opening the box reveals a simple but memorable logo and…
…a bunch of goodies. Right away she’s demonstrating an aptitude for design, yes, but also – nearly as important in packaging – organization. Not only is there a visually-oriented card laying out what’s inside, but each item is also numbered in the order in which it should be viewed.
Here is her portfolio. With a little (at times unhelpful) help from Google Translate, we get a good idea of what she’s telling us before we even open it:
“In case you‘re looking for a designer who likes working with packaging design, identities, commercial design and rebranding. I have a growing passion for …smart packaging solutions and minimalist typography and am still eager to learn more. I spend my time creating low-poly art, typography posters and create my own abstract patterns. I am fascinated by folding miniature packaging and create happy fictitious projects. Check out my portfolio with some of the jobs I’ve done so far.”
And here are some examples of what she’s done, courtesy of that portfolio. “The hardest part was to put the booklet together,” Liza says. “The fact that I have printed it at home, it was inevitable that some papers would turn and twist in the printer and make a different angle.”
This next piece is the first of this package’s 1-2 punch: her CV in the form of a Pantone swatch deck!
“One of the conditions when I started to make this project was that I could do this project at home with my own printer,” she explains. “So the paper I have used is just ordinary printer paper from different Swedish suppliers, in the weight 280 g/m2.”
For the swatch deck she punched holes in each card and secured them with a screw/grommet.
“It was a challenge to cut out and put together … when it comes to precision, just because you want all the pages to look exactly the same. The millimeter precision was a bit hard but I think it all worked out very well.”
Finally, as a reward to the recipient for looking through what she has to offer, Liza has included a square of chocolate (No. 5 in our list of items). Pantone decks and chocolate: Does she understand designers or what?! 😉
