You've finished the content. What's left is the part nobody teaches properly: how big the pages are, how many of them there are, and how heavy the file is when it lands in a stranger's inbox. Then it's thirty applications and a send button.
So here's the whole answer before the reasoning. A3 landscape (420 × 297mm), 15 to 25 pages, exported as single pages, under 10MB — ideally nearer 5MB. That's your send copy. Separately, you keep a 300ppi print master with bleed, at the same page size, containing everything. One file never does both jobs, and the moment you accept that, every remaining decision gets easy.
The reason format goes wrong is that graduates treat it as a taste question. It isn't. It's a deliverability question. Work backwards from how the thing is actually received — dragged out of an email, opened in Preview or Acrobat on a laptop, scrolled fast, maybe forwarded to two other people, maybe printed A3 for the interview — and the numbers stop being arbitrary.
A3 Landscape, Because the Screen Is Landscape and So Is Your Work
Architectural drawings are wide. Plans are wide, sections are wide, that one render you're proud of is wide. Putting them on a portrait page means either shrinking them or rotating them, and rotating them means the reviewer tilts their head or rotates the PDF, which is a small irritation you have voluntarily added to your own application.
A3 landscape also matches the shape of the device it's being read on. A laptop screen is landscape, so a landscape page fills it. A portrait page on a laptop gets fitted to height and leaves two grey bars of nothing either side, which means your work displays smaller than a landscape page would on the same screen. Same file, less visible work.
A3 rather than A4 because the A-series halves cleanly: A3 prints down to A4 with no reformatting, no scaling headaches, no surprise margins. If someone in the office prints your portfolio on the office A4 machine — and in our experience that happens more often than anyone admits — an A3 landscape document lands as a perfectly proportioned A4 landscape one.
If you're applying to practices in the US, swap to 11×17in (Tabloid) landscape, which is the nearest equivalent to A3 in a country that has never adopted ISO 216. Don't send A3 to a New York office and don't send Tabloid to a London one. It's a two-minute change in Document Setup and it signals you know where you're applying.
One caveat the aspect-ratio advice online ignores: a lot of first-pass shortlisting happens on a tablet or a phone. A3 landscape survives that reasonably well. Nine-point captions do not. Here's the test we teach — set your InDesign view to 50% and read your own page. If the captions turn into grey texture, they're too small, and no amount of "but it's legible at 100%" will save them, because nobody reads your portfolio at 100%.
Fifteen to Twenty-Five Pages, and the Sixty-Page One You Don't Send
The send copy is a sample, not an archive. What we've found works is three or four projects across 15 to 25 pages: two spreads for your strongest project, a spread and a half for the second, a spread each for the rest, plus a cover, a contents page and an end page.
That's not a rule handed down from anywhere official. It's the length at which a reviewer finishes the document. A first pass through a shortlist is fast — in our experience you have a couple of minutes at most before a decision gets made about whether to read properly — and a 60-page PDF does not get a couple of minutes, it gets a scroll and a scrub of the scrollbar to see how much is left. A 20-page one gets read to the end, and the end is where your best project should be sitting if you've paced it right.
Part 1 and Part 2 applicants can use the same range, but they're proving different things. Part 1: that you can draw, model, think spatially and produce clean documents. Part 2: that you can carry a project through resolution, with technical evidence in it — a section at a sensible scale, a detail, a bit of evidence you understand how a building goes together. The page count doesn't change. What's on the pages does.
The course teaches project selection in a specific order, and it's the order that matters: strongest projects first by success, then filtered by relevance to the studio you're applying to. If the practice is mostly residential, your housing scheme leads and your non-residential project takes a back seat — still in, because it shows range, but not in the opening position. That's also the answer to "do I make thirty different portfolios?" No. You make one master and you reorder the front of it, which takes ten minutes per application rather than ten hours.
The long version — every project, every iteration, the bits you love that nobody else needs to see — lives in the print master. That's the one you bring to the interview and turn pages in while you talk. It is allowed to be sixty pages. It is not allowed in an email.
Ten Megabytes Is a Ceiling, Five Is a Target
Google's published limit for Gmail attachments is 25MB, and plenty of graduates take that as permission. Don't. The provider limit is not the limit that matters — corporate mail gateways are routinely configured tighter than the provider default, and what we've found in practice is that attachments in the 10MB region are where practice inboxes start behaving unpredictably.
And unpredictably is the operative word. An attachment rejected on size sometimes bounces back with a message. In our experience it just as often doesn't — it gets held by a filter, nobody at the practice ever sees it, and nobody tells you. Your application didn't get rejected. It never arrived. You'll never know which, which is exactly why you don't gamble on the top end of a range.
So: under 10MB always, aim for 5MB, and if a practice states a cap on their careers page, treat it as absolute. They wrote it down because they've had the problem before.
Two Exports From One File, Set Up Once
This is the workflow, and it takes about five minutes to configure permanently.
Print master. Export as Adobe PDF (Print), High Quality Print preset. Images: do not downsample, or downsample bicubic to 300ppi for images above 450ppi. Compression JPEG, Maximum quality. Marks and Bleeds: include bleed, and use the bleed dimension your print shop actually asks for. The course is blunt about this and it's right — bleed varies between about 3mm and 8mm depending on the printer's hardware, so ring them before you set up the document rather than reframing every full-bleed image afterwards. Pages, not spreads, unless your printer has told you otherwise.
Send copy. Same document, File > Export, but build a custom preset. Downsample bicubic to 150ppi for images above 225ppi. Compression JPEG, Medium or High quality — High first, drop to Medium only if you need the megabytes. No bleed, no crop marks, no printer marks. Export as pages, not spreads. Under the General tab, check "View PDF after Exporting" so you actually look at it, and set the initial view to Fit Page.
Pages-not-spreads matters more than it sounds. Exported as spreads, your A3 pages become A2 landscape sheets and the whole thing displays at half the size on screen. Exported as pages, a spread designed to read across the gutter breaks into two halves. That's a design constraint, not an export problem: if a drawing crosses the centreline, either commit to it and accept the split, or pull it back onto one page. Decide before you export, not after.
Save both presets. Name them. You'll use them for the rest of your career.
When It Comes Out at 38MB Anyway
It will, the first time. Here's the diagnosis, in order.
Open the Links panel in InDesign, switch to a list view and sort by size. Nine times out of ten there are two or three offenders doing all the damage: a render exported at 6000px wide and placed at a third of that on the page, or a PSD with twenty live layers, or — the sneaky one — a vector PDF from AutoCAD or Illustrator carrying every line of the full drawing including the layers you switched off. Vector geometry does not downsample on export. It just sits there being enormous.
Fixes, in order of how much quality they cost you. Re-export oversized rasters to roughly the pixel dimensions they occupy on the page at 300ppi and relink. Flatten PSDs to TIFF or JPEG. For monstrous line drawings, rasterise before placing — a 300ppi TIFF of a complex plan is frequently smaller than the vector, and at A3 nobody can tell.
Still over? Drop the send copy to JPEG Medium and 120ppi. Only after that, run Acrobat's PDF Optimiser — not the one-click "Reduce File Size", which is a mudslide, but the Optimiser panel where you can control image downsampling and discard embedded thumbnails and unused objects.
If a practice has stated 5MB and you're at 7MB with nothing left to compress, cut pages. Genuinely — remove your third project rather than degrading the first two. A tight 16-page portfolio that looks crisp beats a 22-page one that looks like a fax.
Send the File. Even When You'd Rather Send a Link.
If the practice's instructions say "PDF attachment, no links", attach the PDF. Every time. The recruiter who wrote that sentence wrote it because they've spent an afternoon chasing expired WeTransfers and Dropbox folders that demand a login, and ignoring it marks your application as one that doesn't read instructions — which is a specific and expensive thing to be accused of in this profession.
Where no instruction exists, attach the send copy anyway and put the link to your online portfolio in the body of the email as a secondary. Attachment first, link second. Never link only.
Motion and interactive work is the one genuine exception. Don't embed video in a PDF — it inflates the file and frequently doesn't play. Give the sequence one page of frame grabs with a caption explaining what's moving, and bring the actual film to the interview on your own laptop where it will definitely work.
Name the File Like an Adult
Surname_Firstname_Part2_Portfolio_2025.pdf. That's it.
Not portfolio_FINAL_v7(2).pdf. Not Untitled-1.pdf. Not your initials only. The file is going to be downloaded into a folder alongside forty others and looked at again three weeks later by someone who has forgotten your name, and a filename that carries your surname and your stage is the cheapest possible advantage. Same convention for the CV. Same convention for the covering letter if it's separate.
And check the PDF's document title in File > Properties, because that's what shows in the Acrobat title bar, and it reads precisely how you think it reads when it says "portfolio_v7 copy".
The Interview Copy Is a Different Object
If you get the call, print the master. A3 landscape, same page size, so the printed object and the file they've already seen are recognisably the same portfolio.
Bind it wire-o or spiral, not perfect bound. A perfect-bound book will not stay open flat on a meeting table, so either you hold it down with one hand while gesturing with the other, or it closes itself mid-sentence. Wire-o lies flat and folds back. It costs less and it works better.
Bring the full-length version, not the 20-page sample — the interview is the one moment where depth beats brevity, because someone is going to point at a drawing and ask what happened next, and you want the next thing to be on the following page rather than in a story you tell.
Get it printed at least two days before. Not the night before. Print shops are a magnet for the specific disaster of discovering your bleed was set wrong, and if you want the composition side of this sorted too, our piece on the layout mistakes killing job applications covers what's happening inside those pages.
Format decisions are the easiest marks in the whole application, and they're the ones graduates agonise over longest. A3 landscape. Twenty pages. Five megabytes. Your surname in the filename. Now go and send the thing.
