Where to place an interior designer's portfolio. How to make the perfect graphic designer portfolio? Helpful resources, books, and portfolio examples
The best way to market yourself well is to create the perfect portfolio. A portfolio is a reflection of the results of your work, your work. A good portfolio is essential for attracting clients. And a designer simply must have a portfolio.
And, if you agree with that, ask yourself a few questions. How much time are you willing to spend improving your portfolio? Are you sure you are using your best work? One thing I can say for sure.
It doesn't matter whether your portfolio is made digital or on paper. The main thing is to keep improving it.
As your career progresses, you will realize that nothing is more important than presenting the best of your work in a clear and engaging way. This article will help you do this.
Here are 20 tips and examples for creating the perfect designer portfolio. These tips are divided into tips for paper and online portfolios. If you want to become a leader in this business, keep these tips in mind.
And yes. Your opinion is important to us. Your comments are welcome.
Paper Portfolios
20. Volume
When working on a design portfolio, the first question worth answering is how much work it should contain.
For a comprehensive portfolio, you'll need at least 20 of your best work to make the right impression.
19. Suitable examples
If you are applying for a full-time position, it is best to include suitable examples of work in your portfolio. You need to be sure the examples are relevant to the position you are applying for.
If you are a digital artist job seeker, you must submit drawings in numbers. Pencil sketches will not work here:
18. Context
Whether you are a designer or an artist is not so important. Because in any case, you will have to create graphics based on briefs from creatives. You will need to be able to interpret the brief carefully.
If your portfolio has scattered images, that's not enough. You need to provide them in context. Where did these paintings come from? How did the idea come about? What is the chain of thought?
Anything that can help uncover the concept of images should be included in the portfolio.
17. Work for pleasure
Even if you are in the process of creating a portfolio for a particular contract or position, include more than just custom work. After all, a designer is not only a job, but also a hobby, isn't it?
You can include any work in your portfolio. If, for example, you are an illustrator looking for freelance work, having projects that you did not commission will certainly help.
16. Expiry date
As you gain new experience over time, your work will also change. This does not mean that new works should be superimposed on top of old ones.
Depending on how many new jobs you do, it's worth cleaning up and updating your portfolio occasionally.
A portfolio is not just a collection of your design work. Some recommendations should be highlighted in bold. Insert them directly on top of your artwork. Moreover, recommendations in real life will help even more.
All this shows your possibilities. It doesn't matter where or when you left your job. Make sure you are on excellent terms with your coworkers and ask them for recommendations. Recommendations always help.
14. Step back
You can view your portfolio in a third person. You've probably already had the experience when more experienced employees looked at your portfolio, and you expected their criticism.
It is very important that you know your strengths and weaknesses. Based on this, you will be able to prioritize growth and graphics practices.
13. Show yourself in all your glory
Think of your portfolio as your creative bio. This does not mean that you should only show your designs. You need to give the impression that you are a professional.
Emphasize that you are a professional in everything. Both in communication skills and meeting deadlines.
12. Sell yourself
What other talents do you have? Are you a good photographer? Or a singer? Let your prospective employer know about all your creative opportunities, not just the main ones:
11. Portfolio with indices
When you read a book or flip through it, or browse a website, you tag pages of interest or bookmark.
Imagine your employer would do the same. Make it easy for people - number the pages.
Online portfolio
10. Platform
There are several options for publishing your online portfolio. Whenever you need a clean, personalized portfolio space, you just buy a domain and ask someone to create a website for you.
Or install WordPress and customize it for yourself. If the above is beyond your power - IM Creator is at your service.
9. Set goals
You should make sure that you understand the need to create an online portfolio. What is the purpose of your portfolio? Feedback? Or employment?
Answering these questions will help you better customize your portfolio and increase your chances of success.
8. Be selective
Don't put most of your work online. Be selective. Choose the best of your work. Make sure they represent most of your options. Don't show it all at once.
Make people want to see more of your work. This is exactly what you should do with your online portfolio:
7. Edit
Malika Favre, a London-based illustrator, says: “ Supervise your work. An online portfolio needs to keep the same rhythm as a print portfolio: you have to tell a story.
Arrange your projects so that they flow from each other, complement each other. If the old project has to be deleted to fit the new story, so be it. "
6. Don't tell - show
A website as a business card says a lot about you. More precisely, it shows. Therefore, you need to make sure that your site visitors will see what you want to say first, rather than read it.
5. Update
An important task in the development of a portfolio is its regular updating with your fresh works. If you leave your site without updating for at least a few months, people will not buy what you have already posted.
4. Possibility of quick updates
You need a site design that allows you to quickly add new works and delete old ones in two or three clicks. If the updates take too long, you will get tired of doing them regularly, as you will be loaded with the current work.
Newbies in web design are often worried about how to create a portfolio and make it effective and profitable. Let's tell.
Sometimes building your own portfolio seems like an insurmountable obstacle. In fact, it can be done in less than a couple of weeks. The most important thing is to understand how the portfolio should look and what kind of clients you want to get.
Who is your client
Quite simply, your portfolio and web designer skills are the product you are looking to sell, so you need to understand who your target customer is. You wouldn't be offering sneakers to nutritional fans, would you? Everything works the same in design. Decide on the type of sites you want to create (landing pages, business card sites, corporate sites), as well as the business areas for which you want to design (beauty industry, banking, construction).
Come up with a client
When you have decided what kind of clients and from what area you want to attract, it's time to think about how to make a web designer portfolio that will help you with this.
It's actually simple: put yourself in the client's shoes and create a task for yourself. To create your first landing page, we advise you to find a website design brief (many examples can be found on the Internet) and fill it out. Try to imagine what you would be most worried about if you were the customer yourself.
Get started
Having set a task for yourself and filling out the brief, proceed to the analysis of competitors: it never hurts to see how the industry leaders do websites. Then check out Behance and Pinterest for good examples. Make an extensive selection of sites that you like, analyze them and think about which site has the most winning colors, which one is typography, and which one is block design.
The last thing to do is to combine the developments into one ready-made layout. In which program to do this - the choice is yours, there are many programs for creating websites, and the choice depends only on which one is more pleasant and convenient for you to work with.
Make a beautiful case
Never present your work in the form of chaotic images uploaded to a file hosting service - this is a sure way to ensure that your web designer portfolio will not impress anyone. You need to post it on dedicated platforms like Behance or Dribbble.
Take the time to complete the case. It often happens that preparing a presentation of a finished work takes almost more time than the project itself. In a case study, tell an interesting and detailed history of the project, and don't just show pictures of the finished interface.
Avoid common mistakes
Newbies always stumble over the same thing, and portfolio design is no exception. We've rounded up five of the most common mistakes when building a web designer portfolio. Your task is to prevent them.
There are many works, but all are unsuccessful
It is more effective to follow the principle of "less is more." If you have only three works in your portfolio, but they are ideally suited to the type and needs of the client, you will have a better chance of getting an order than a designer with a dozen obscure works.
You haven't updated your portfolio for a long time
A portfolio is not a static document, it needs life and dynamics, so do not be lazy to constantly replenish it by uploading your best works.
Poorly designed case
If you just downloaded the site's jeepgs, the customer will not understand anything. For him, all these are incomprehensible pictures. Moreover, he is far from always able to distinguish a good site from a bad one, which is why he is looking for a web design specialist.
Outright plagiarism
Yes, we are all inspired by the work of cool studios and successful freelancers, but this is not a reason to redraw their work and pass it off as ours. Sooner or later it will be revealed, and your reputation will suffer forever.
- Live feedback from teachers
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- 15 works in your portfolio
One of the most important questions for a novice designer is how to fill your portfolio? Where to get the first clients? How to get your first projects?
There are many different ways to start a career in design. Starting from working as an intern in a design studio, ending with the creation of your own studio. One of the easiest ways to start a career is to look for jobs as a freelancer. For all its drawbacks, freelancing seems like a very attractive option to many. But in order to receive orders, you must definitely show your work to a potential client. Few will agree to give an order to a designer who has a completely empty portfolio. It turns out a vicious circle: no orders → no portfolio, no portfolio → no orders.
First, you need to realize that the first projects in the portfolio (cases) are a very, very important step. The quality of the first works determines which clients will come to you, and, in fact, the entire further path of the designer. Therefore, in the first cases, it is important to show yourself as much as possible, your knowledge, and modest (for now) skills. Yes, you may not be able to surprise clients with sophisticated techniques and super-creative tricks, but you can demonstrate your approach and thinking. If you have good projects in your initial portfolio, this will give you a serious acceleration, because such works tend to spread on design blogs and raise the rating on freelance exchanges.
And, of course, you can't fill your portfolio with mediocre works. What your first jobs will be, so will your subsequent clients.
So, let's move on to the ways to fill the portfolio.
1. Design for yourself
The most obvious way to get a portfolio case is to design for yourself or your company. It can be a website, corporate identity or something like that. The difficulty here is that you will have to come up with restrictions on your own, because design without restrictions is not design, but pure creativity. But if you do a good job, this project will become not only a case in your portfolio, but also your business tool.
2. Design for friends or acquaintances
You can offer a job to relatives, friends or good acquaintances for a symbolic reward. But be very careful with this option. You have little experience with clients (otherwise, you would not have read this text). Most likely, something will go wrong and you risk ruining the relationship. Think 10 times before trying this option.
3. Design for a fictional client
This was the beginning, in particular, of Artemy Lebedev. You can independently come up with a client with his tasks and limitations, and then solve these design problems. It is important to come up with a client as close to reality as possible. Don't design for a brain transplant firm. Better design for a fictional PR agency. The simpler the better.
If you are starting a career in the field of web design or mobile application design, you can come up with a useful and, as you think, in-demand service, and then create a design for it. Just try not to be another mobile weather app;)
4. Design for a famous brand or website
5. Competitions
There are many design contests. Personally, I am skeptical about them, because most often they offer to work for free, for a chance to receive a remuneration that does not exceed the average cost of such a contract in the market. But for a start it will do.
Some of the contests can be found on social networks and blogs, but the bulk is on specialized sites like 99designs and GoDesigner, as well as on freelance exchanges. The good thing about this method is that you don't need to invent a task, it already exists. And if successful, you will not only get the job done, but also make some money.
By the way, there are also very good contests, for example, VKontakte contests for the development of mobile applications with a prize fund of millions of rubles. Despite the fact that they are already completed, there is nothing stopping you from making a decision and placing it in your portfolio.
6. Free work ("for portfolio")
I strongly advise against looking for a customer who will agree that you work for him for free. First, any work must be paid. Even a beginner's work costs money. Secondly, the chance to find a normal client in this way tends to zero.
7. Project of a famous studio or designer
You can take a problem that your colleagues have already solved. Look at the work of famous designers and studios, pick out what you think is bad and do it better. In addition to experience and a good case, you can count on some resonance in the design environment (wow, the student did better than Studio X!).
8. Own project
A very useful method both from the point of view of practice and from the point of view of public benefit. By creating a thematic collection, a web service, a design framework, a set of free icons, or PSD templates, you not only fill your portfolio, but also help other people. In addition, if your project turns out to be good, over time it can become a source of income.
For example, the service for taking notes Enotus Artyom Nosenko (Artyom, of course, is not a beginner, but an excellent example):
9. Solving a real problem
In my opinion, the best way to show the world and potential clients what you can do is to find a real problem in the real world and solve it with the designer's methods and tools. This will develop you as a real designer and show you the range of tasks that are interesting to you.
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Graphic Designer Portfolio
Price: Free
Good for
designers, photographers, portfolio sites, creative professionals.
Description
An interesting and stylish template for a portfolio website. Showcase all of your designs in a simple yet memorable way that helps visitors focus on your creativity. Designed with usability in mind and following web design trends, all you have to do is upload your photos, set up your contact page and start blogging to promote yourself online.
Price: Free
- UX / UI designer resume
UX / UI designer resume
Price: Free
Good for
UX designer, UI designer, web designer.
Description
Portfolio website template for the creative professional. Download high quality examples of work, show what you can do, and help visitors get in touch with you quickly using our contact form. The template uses animation, convenient strips-blocks with information, a professional gallery where you can upload photos, video files and add text posters. Any element is edited by clicking the mouse.
Price: Free
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Interior Designer Portfolio
Price: Free
Good for
interior designers, architects, portfolio sites, creative professionals.
Description
The clean and simple design of this free portfolio website template is great for showcasing your design work. Upload photos of projects, add contact information, customize all the elements to your liking and publish the site in one click.
Price: Free
- Architect's portfolio
Architect's portfolio
Price: Free
Good for
portfolio of architects, designers and other professionals.
Description
Use this minimalist free website template to create a stylish online portfolio. Submit all your projects on the home page using the Grid Gallery. Add to each image in the gallery a link to your website's internal page. By clicking on any image, the visitor will be taken to a separate page of a specific project. Hide a lot of pages from the main menu to make site navigation simple and convenient. Add your information, resume, and don't forget to set up a contact form so it's easy to get in touch with you.
Price: Free
- Web Designer Portfolio
Web Designer Portfolio
Price: Free
Good for
graphic designers, web designers, photographers, creative professionals and portfolio sites.
Description
A great template for a designer portfolio site - it will help reflect your creative personality and present all projects online in a winning way. Just add your photos and text descriptions, edit any elements as you need, and publish the site in one click. Don't forget to connect your social media accounts and set up a contact form to contact customers.
Price: Free
- Graphic and web designer
Graphic and web designer
Price: Free
Good for
web designer, graphic designer.
Description
If you need to create an impressive resume, use this website template. It consists of two pages: a biography and a portfolio gallery, where each image is clickable and leads to a page with more details. Start editing and replace the sample template information with your own data and images. You can add high quality photos to your portfolio gallery to showcase your work as effectively as possible. Any detail of the template can be edited as you wish.
Price: Free
- 3D Designer Portfolio
3D Designer Portfolio
Price: Free
Good for
art director, motion designer.
Description
Template for creating a custom portfolio site. Any element is customizable as you wish. The anchor menu and project gallery on the homepage will help you quickly grab attention and showcase your work. Each project opens on a separate page with photos, videos and detailed information. An unusual menu expands to full screen and contains three sections: projects, contacts and bio. Start editing and add any number of sections and pages to present yourself to your clients.
Price: Free
- Illustrator
Illustrator
Price: Free
Good for
illustrators, artists, designers.
Description
The illustrations you create reflect your character and personality. Your site should do the same. Clean and simple, this template is perfect for keeping your audience focused on your artwork, and the Wix Art Store app helps you sell digital files online.
Price: Free
- Illustrator Portfolio
Illustrator Portfolio
Price: Free
Good for
illustrators, artists, designers, photographers, portfolio sites, creative professionals.
Description
The clean design of this portfolio website template allows your artwork to speak for itself. Nothing will distract your visitors from the most important thing - the image gallery. Just upload your photos, customize your contact page and add interesting information about yourself. Your stylish modern website will be ready in no time!
Price: Free
- Residential architecture
Your portfolio is one of the most important things you'll ever design. He introduces you to the world and, if you are a freelancer, usually your portfolio plays an important role in whether clients choose you to hire or not.
By looking at thousands of portfolios on the Internet, you can clearly identify the shortcomings that every second freelancer repeats. That is why we decided to talk about them so that henceforth, you will be more careful and not repeat them.
1. Indication of your age
Oddly enough, this is extremely common information that can be found in the portfolio of web designers. Designers feel the need to present themselves in a way that makes the page more personal, but they can't think of anything good, so they go back to basics like, "I'm a 22-year-old web designer from Papua New Guinea."
Only children brag about their age
It worries me every time I see it. Of course, this is not the worst mistake you could make, but it just smells like a beginner. You have hardly ever seen someone get caught up in the fact that they are a 43-year-old web designer. Only young people feel the need to wear their age like a badge of honor.
"You will never see someone brag about being a 43-year-old web designer."
If you look at the portfolios of venerable designers, you will find that they only boast of one thing - their experience. For example: "I have been creating websites for various companies for over 10 years." Now it really is a figure worth bragging about.
What's the difference?
Personally, I have certain mixed feelings when I read such information: who, in general, needs it? Do you want people to hire you based on talent and experience, or because you were born in a particular year? If you don't want potential customers to rate you by your age, why are you sharing it?
Remember, the only time a prospect might think twice about hiring a performer is when he sees his age. Even if you are the most talented web designer, the age in your portfolio can alienate many clients: I personally would not entrust the development of my website to a 20-year-old specialist.
Just a necessity
Leave it all aside. I don't want to know how old you are, what type of computer mouse you use, or how often you buy a new pair of sneakers. Tell me exactly what you are doing and prove it with some compelling examples. This brings us to the next point.
2. Demonstration of school projects 
Here's another thing that constantly surprises young designers. They always feel the need to showcase their school projects.
This is not a home fridge to display drawings, but a professional portfolio, and clients want to see real work.
If this is all you have, then you better show the following ...
Let's take a step back. If you just graduated from high school, college, and so on, and your customer experience is zero, then the best option is to create the simplest website to show it as an example. Many potential customers won't mind this, especially if that inexperience is paired with a low price tag.
Post paid work
By this I mean that once you have a few projects to showcase yourself, you should consider removing your student work. Otherwise, you may find yourself in a situation where a client is looking at your portfolio and thinking, “Hey, this guy is really good! Oh wait, student papers? He is a beginner, so I'd better look for another one, because I need a professional! "
See how many double standards are there? Even if the client thinks that your work looks amazing at first glance, when he sees and understands that these are just student projects, they immediately regard you as inexperienced. Is it crap? Absolutely not! This is true? Not. This is how the world works.
3. Lack of confidence
There is a time and a place to be humble, but your portfolio is not one of them. So often you see really talented designers presenting themselves to the client with short and shaky characteristics, and it can really drive you crazy.
"There is a time and a place to be humble, but your portfolio is not one of them."
“I’m just getting started” or “I hope that one day I will achieve ...” - these things may not sound as bad as you write them, but they destroy confidence in your ability to produce quality results.
Customers are a reflection of your level of confidence
If you can't get enough confidence to tell the client that you are an amazing designer, then they are unlikely to come to an opinion of you on their own.
For a potential client, what you write about yourself provides very little information, but it can play an important role. If you are in doubt about your ability, the client may go looking for another professional or use your weakness to get them to do more work for less money.
Fooling around
Again, there are times when confidence can turn into arrogance. If all the information in your portfolio is literally overwhelmed with overconfidence, then it will make the client run away as quickly as lack of confidence. This is a fine line you walk on, and finding balance is not always easy. You need to figure out how to tell the client how awesome you are, but try not to brag about how awesome you are.
Often the best way to do this is to let your work speak for itself. If your work is truly amazing, then you don't have to convince the client that you are really good at what you do.
4. Grammar 
This is very difficult for designers, most of them. Many of the designers have their own blogs, and often write more than they develop websites, but even so, you will not have a problem finding a grammatical error in their texts.
What I am talking about now is a very important thing that you should pay attention to. It's not the end of the world if you write with only participles or end a sentence with an excuse, just make sure a normal educated person can read your sentences without wondering how you graduated from high school.
What if Russian is not your strong point?
The designers, with whom I often talked, try to do their best, but, unfortunately, many of them do not have Russian forte. And this can be easily understood by reading the portfolio.
This is a very sensitive topic, especially if you only speak one language. Again, if you speak two or three, then you can be called a unique person. At the same time, do not forget that speaking fluently in German or French does not mean at all that you can write a high-quality About Me text. So, if you decide to make your portfolio in several languages, then it is better to contact a specialist, spend some money, but do the proper translation.
"You want feedback that you are a good designer, then don't let bad grammar get in the way."
5. Neglecting the blog
This is another thing to deal with: a designer starts a new blog and is enthusiastic about how often the blog will be updated.
At first, you roughly publish posts, share helpful tips and your work, but a few months after you start to relax, you will notice that your blog has turned into a scary old doll that is lying around in the closet with a bunch of other unnecessary things.
Digital web
The most interesting thing is that you probably left out the message that your portfolio visitors will see. One of the first things I do when I visit a blog is looking at the date of the last post, what will tell me about your blog and how useful it is?
The lack of new blog posts and dismissive attitude will make the client doubt your competence, that you continue to take projects and work successfully. Perhaps you gave up your freelance career a long time ago and went to work in one of the offices for a permanent salary.
Do it right or don't do it at all
A blog is a great addition to any portfolio, but if not done well it can actually drag you down and hurt your work. The advice in this case is simple: Either spend some of your time updating your blog on a regular basis with good quality and interesting content, or just don't do it.
You don't have to post every day or even every week, but at least you should try to post something monthly to get people interested.
Once you've decided to create your blog, use it as a place to exchange knowledge, spread the necessary information and, possibly, to measure traffic, but not to post photos of your cats or think about how delicious pizza is prepared in a nearby establishment and for who are you going to vote in the next election. This content is only suitable for a personal blog, so it's best to leave it there.
6. Demonstration of weaknesses
Nowadays, there is a tendency in the portfolio of web designers to showcase a set of skills and in the meantime put some things in opposition. Quite often, this information takes the form of a small graph or visualization, as shown below.
Pretty neat? This quickly gives the client an understanding of the services you are offering and the level of skill you have. Great, that's so honest!
The problem, however, is that the way you see the information shown and the way the prospect reads it is quite different. It turns out that you think that the client sees it like this:
Unfortunately, this is what he actually sees:
"Do not point out your weaknesses"
It's good to have strengths and weaknesses - everyone has it. However, I'm not convinced that exposing weaknesses in any form, written or graphic, is not the best marketing strategy.
Think before creating a portfolio
The real benefit of this article is to take a close look at every component of your web designer portfolio, from the artwork you display to the information you write about yourself.
At every stage of building your portfolio, ask yourself if you are truly improving the quality of the finished product or are actually decreasing the likelihood that someone will hire you. You will probably find that everything that you thought was correct and necessary information, in the end, will turn out to be just a load that will drag you down.
