Once upon a time, designers toted around big, black zippered leatherette cases that piled up in headhunters’ offices and in studio and agency conference rooms, waiting to be reviewed. You “dropped off your book”—your precious, one-and-only portfolio—leaving it with a receptionist. Sometimes when you returned to pick it up, you even got a sense that it had been looked at.

In the 1990s, the stakes were ratcheted up with the advent of the handmade portfolio box. Kind of a high-end craft project, it was fashioned from brushed aluminum or foam board; covered with linen fabric or handmade paper; filled with artily-lit photographs of work mounted on Lucite sheaves. Some of those weighty, one-of-a-kind creations were credited with helping get recent graduates high-paying jobs, but everyone agreed they were expensive and unwieldy, and they ultimately became dinosaurs.

CD portfolios didn’t quite fulfill the profession’s expectations, either. Not unlike fancy boxes fastened with grommets or raffia bows, they made the recipient do too much work—and might crash the system, be a nightmare to navigate or not open at all. “We groan when we get CDs,” says RitaSue Siegel, president of RitaSue Siegel Resources, the executive search division of Aquent. “Half the time we can’t open them. Designers all assume that everyone is working on the latest Mac. Well, it ain’t so. And how do you store them?”

The new paradigm is the e-portfolio: a PDF file that can be e-mailed, printed out as a booklet and printed out in a larger presentation format for interviews. It is the delivery system for the 2000’s: flexible and fast. Every page tells a story, and you can breeze through it in a few clicks. Who has time for drop-offs any more? If there’s a job posting on craigslist or Creative Hotlist, hundreds of résumés arrive via e-mail within 24 hours. The smartest of them will have—not a link to a URL, which also makes people do too much work—an attachment of two or three PDF pages, kind of a portfolio synopsis that, if it fits the job, can put the applicant right on top of the pile.

“The majority of my clients who want a freelancer want that person yesterday,” explains Rita Anderson, senior recruiter at Roz Goldfarb Associates, another leading New York search firm, which handles 30% freelance assignments. “They expect me to present samples of that person’s work on the day they call. PDFs make that possible. Candidates who can’t wrestle their book away from somewhere else may lose out on an opportunity,” she adds. “The first two pages should make the client say, ‘That’s exactly what we’re looking for,’ or ‘We should talk to this person.’ And with a PDF there’s a better chance they’ll keep it on their hard drive and remember you when the next project comes up, even if they don’t use you right away.”

To design a PDF portfolio, instead of stuffing various-sized pieces into an off-the-shelf product or creating a one-of-a-kind art object, you are truly designing a book. A flexible, editable book about yourself and your work. It has a cover, a title page, and ideally, twelve to fifteen pages. Its style could be anything from corporate to hip-hop: whatever is really you and speaks to your intended audience. The format could be any reasonable size, but 11" x 8 1/2" horizontal is easy to view on screen and to print out, bind and pop into a FedEx envelope.

Everything that’s been difficult to transport or show, especially large or three-dimensional projects like signage, vehicles, posters and packaging can be displayed as if it were on a page of, say, Communication Arts—except it’s all in a fast-loading file of no more than 2MB that can be edited or rearranged to suit the position or assignment.