You already know all ten. They're published early on purpose. Working out which of your pieces suit which client is exactly the prep this exam is testing. What you don't know is which one you'll draw.
Every card works the same way. One new piece, two formats, exact dimensions printed on the card. Every card is answerable from any portfolio in this room, and none of them need After Effects.
An eleven-person studio finishing a co-op horror game where four players share one flashlight. They've been building it for three years in a converted garage in Long Beach and they're two months from launch with no one to handle store art. The role is a paid summer internship. The person who takes it will make everything a player sees before they ever press play.
Whether you can hold a consistent visual tone across pieces. Horror falls apart the moment one asset looks cheerful, and they've been burned by a freelancer who delivered five things that looked like five different games.
Horror does not mean dark. A capsule that's 90% black reads as a broken image at thumbnail size on a storefront full of competitors.
A taco shop that's been on one corner for nineteen years is opening a second location four miles away. The owner's daughter runs the Instagram and has decided they need a real designer for the opening. There's no brand guide. There's a hand-painted sign, a menu someone made in Word, and a lot of goodwill in the neighborhood.
Legibility from across a street, and not losing what the old sign already means to people. They are extremely suspicious of anything that looks like a chain.
The poster is read from twenty feet away by someone driving. If your date and address aren't the second thing visible after the name, it failed.
A after-school arts program running out of a rented church basement, serving about sixty kids a week. Their entire annual budget is smaller than one Adobe license. They need a designer for a year-end donation drive and they cannot pay you. But the director will write you a recommendation letter that a college will actually read.
Warmth, and exactly one clear ask. Their last flyer had four different ways to give money on it and raised almost nothing because nobody knew what to do.
600 × 200 is brutally short. Anything you designed for the square will not survive being cut down. The header has to be designed separately, not resized.
A 350-capacity room that books five nights a week. Punk, cumbia, noise, whatever fills it. They print posters and staple them to poles, and they've done it that way since 1997. They need someone who can turn around a poster in a day when a bill changes, which it always does.
Whether typography alone can carry a piece. Bands rarely send usable photos, so most of the time all you have is names, a date, and a price.
Five bands is a hierarchy problem, not a list. The headliner, two supports, and two openers are four different sizes. And every band has to be readable, including the one playing at 7pm.
Your own school's robotics team qualified for the state championship for the first time in eleven years. They leave in nine days. They need a send-off graphic for the gym screen and for social, and every single person who will see it already knows what the school colors are.
School pride that isn't generic. They've watched every club on campus post the same centered-text-over-a-photo graphic for years and they are sick of it.
The gym version is seen for four seconds from sixty feet by people who are talking to each other. Body copy is wasted there. Decide what the one thing is.
A three-person tabletop publisher launching their fourth game: a card game where players are rival lighthouse keepers sabotaging each other's lamps. They live and die on crowdfunding. If the launch day image doesn't work, the campaign doesn't fund, and there is no game.
Whether you can explain a game in one image. Somebody scrolling past has about a second to understand what this is before deciding.
The link preview gets cropped differently on every platform. Anything critical within about 60px of an edge is gone.
A 90-seat community theater announcing next season: six shows across a year, ranging from a Greek tragedy to a children's Christmas musical. They want one designer for the whole season so the marketing finally looks like it came from one building.
Whether one visual idea can stretch across six shows that have nothing in common. A system, not six unrelated posters.
Six titles is a lot of type. The season has to read as one thing first and six things second, or it's just a schedule.
A small distributor that buys two or three films a year out of festivals and releases them in about forty theaters plus streaming. They just picked up a first feature. A slow-burn sci-fi about a woman who wakes up as the only person left on a research station and starts receiving her own voice on the radio. No stars. The poster is the entire marketing budget.
Restraint. Their audience is people who read reviews, and a poster that oversells reads as a bad movie before anyone has seen a frame.
These two want opposite things. A one-sheet rewards a slow read and negative space. A thumbnail has to survive being two inches wide next to autoplaying video. Same film, genuinely different solutions.
A hardware brand built entirely on gaming is expanding into things you'd wear and carry outside your bedroom. Bags, apparel, everyday audio. The problem is real: the same three-headed-snake logo and neon green that scream credibility to a nineteen-year-old on Twitch look like a costume in a coffee shop. They need a designer who understands both rooms.
Whether you can shift register without abandoning the brand. Go too far and you're generic streetwear. Not far enough and it's a gaming ad with a backpack in it.
Existing brand assets aren't yours to redraw. Working inside somebody's identity while changing its tone is a different skill than designing a new one, and it's most of what an in-house job actually is.
An energy drink company that operates more like a media company. They barely sponsor other people’s events. They invent their own, then film them. A one-on-one breaking battle staged in a bullring. Mountain bikers dropping off a Utah cliff face. Cliff divers going off a Balkan bridge. Teams racing homemade non-motorized vehicles down a hill. The brand doesn’t appear in the event. The brand is the event.
You’re designing the announcement for one of them. Pick an event they run. Breaking or dance, freeride mountain biking, cliff diving, motocross, a fighting game final, a music showcase, a soapbox race. Or pitch a new one in the same spirit.
If you invent one, the name starts with “Red Bull.” That’s not decoration, it’s the entire mechanism: Red Bull Rampage, Red Bull BC One, Red Bull Cliff Diving, Red Bull Final Summoning. They don’t sponsor somebody else’s event and put a logo in the corner. They name it, own it, and film it. A good one does double duty the way Final Summoning does: it describes the event and lands as a reference the audience already knows.
Part of what you’ll defend is why that event suited the work already in your portfolio.
Working inside an established identity under real constraints, and doing it consistently across sports that have nothing in common. There is a brand book, it is enormous, and it is not a suggestion. They also care whether you understand that your design is never the main thing on screen.
Look at style and output, not dimensions. How much sits on the image versus beside it, how the mark is placed, how loud the type gets, what stays the same across three sports that share nothing else.
Two traps here. Broadcast graphics get overlaid with chat, camera boxes, and a scoreboard. Design for what’s left, not the full rectangle. And the brand mark placement isn’t yours to move. Working around a fixed element is the job.