An online design portfolio can act as a huge stepping stone to establish your presence and get your work recognized globally. Whether you are a newbie in the field seeking a job, or a freelancer wishing to build an online reputation or brand, it is of utmost importance that your design portfolio leaves a mark on your visitors and potential clients. Your clients are interested in seeing a visual representation of your talent, the four or five years you spent at your university, and the designs you worked on during that time can make or break your design career. Therefore it is necessary to put your best foot forward with your design portfolio. And while there is no specific right or wrong way in design, here are some common design portfolio mistakes to avoid:
1. Lacking a Personal Touch
The vast internet out there is filled with free, unpublished work waiting to be utilized. This work is typically cold and redundant. Ensuring your designs have a personal touch – an infusion of a little bit of your character or style will not only help your clients recognize and appreciate your work but also safeguard your work against copyrights. Also, employers have possibly seen all that is available on the internet multiple times, and recognize the style of sample content. Additionally, you lose the opportunity to grow as an individual and put across a signature to your work and designs.
At the same time, it is important to maintain a balance between being over-the-top expressive about your work and letting your work get blindsided while trying to emphasize the presence of your style. Draw the line between showcasing professional designs and exhibiting personal artwork.
2. Not Improvising on Failing Projects
Even the most brilliant designers out there face ups and downs while working on designs. However, it is important to come out of these mistakes and work on improving your work, instead of just letting it go to waste. Differentiate between work that needs to be improvised and work that needs to be killed. Ensure that your best work is displayed in the portfolio, along with exhibiting improvements to other work profiles.
3. Lack of Context
Just posting images and visuals on your site is not going to help your potential client understand your work. Simply adding images by themselves, without a creative brief, defeats the point of creating a portfolio. It is important to view your work as the potential client might, and ask yourself: what will they want to know? When was the work created? How? What was the timeline? What are the elements of your project? That’s the bare minimum you need, but it doesn’t hurt to provide more.
Remember in maths at school when you were told not just to give the answer, but “show your working”? That’s a good rule to apply to portfolio sites too. So if it’s possible, and if your client permits it, consider writing a full case study, including notes on the design process; early sketches; rejected concepts and designs, and so forth.
4. Your Design is Lacking A Purpose
Many portfolio websites avoid making the previous obvious mistakes but are still failures because it’s just not clear what they’re trying to achieve. Often that’s because the designer doesn’t know themselves, beyond a general ‘well, you’ve got to have a website, haven’t you?’ But if you don’t think about what you want your website to achieve, how will you know if you’ve achieved it? So before you start, sit down to have a long, hard think about what your main goals are. For instance, if you’re looking to get a job, have you made that clear?
People are not telepathic so if you don’t say, people will assume you’re happy to remain a freelancer. Alternatively, maybe you already have enough freelance work, but wouldn’t mind getting some better-paid commissions? In which case, why not make your preferred rates clear, and avoid long email conversations with time-wasters who just want to lowball you? Or perhaps you don’t want more work right now, but just want to steadily build up your name and reputation. In which case, you’ll want to think about including testimonials, press reviews and other ‘social proof’ to bolster your standing.
5. Inconsistency
Perhaps every project you have worked on will have a different font and layout. That should not, however, be the case for your portfolio. Being inconsistent and having too many fonts and background colors is not only visually misleading but also gives an impression that the designer is not reliable enough in shaping a unified project. For that reason, think of the portfolio to be designed as simply a new project. Harmonize your various works by creating a sample to be used throughout the entire booklet. Take the time, as well, to modify the fonts and background layouts accordingly.
A final word…
Your potential clients and employers may want to visit your site a number of times over the course of a year. If nothing new is added, they may assume you’ve had no work. So think about how you can refresh the site on a regular basis. Could you add new work examples, refresh the design, or maybe even add a blog?
Also, sign up for a website analysis tool like Google Analytics to find out how many people are visiting the site, and which bits they’re most interested in. Don’t jump to unwarranted conclusions, but do use this information to improve the site and its content, bit by bit, over time.
Finally, it’s always helpful to check out what other creatives have done with their portfolio sites to get inspiration for improvements to yours.
