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How To Create An Impressive Online Portfolio

From designers to painters, it's important to create an impressive portfolio to showcase your talents. 

How to Create a Portfolio

Today, creating a well designed and properly curated portfolio is easier than ever. Gone are the days of having to lug around a folder or bulky portfolio case to show off your best work. All it takes now is a link and everybody and anybody has the chance to view your portfolio. However, it's becoming increasingly important to have a quality portfolio for potential clients, customers, or bosses to have the best first experience of you or your work possible.

Get Started Making Your Portfolio

First, you'll want to take some time to make a plan and create some goals for your portfolio. Summarize your skills, techniques, or capabilities into one compelling sentence that explains who you are as an artist or designer. Next, you have to identify what the purpose for your portfolio is.

Are you trying to get hired, find clients, catalog designs, or showcase your artwork? The most successful portfolios pick a direction or goal and try to exceed in one area. Take a look at these 80 Creative Portfolios if you need to get some inspiration before you decide.

Choose A Portfolio Platform

The best platform to have your portfolio on will depend on what you're looking to get out of it. Behance works incredibly smooth with the Adobe Suite and offers a free platform to add art and design while also promoting popular content automatically on their home page. Free advertising is always cool, right? However, Behance doesn't let you customize your portfolio page and you end up with 'behance.net/YourUsername' as your URL.

If you're looking for something a little more powerful in terms of customization to curate your platform to fit your content, I suggest you check out the popular sites; Cargo, Wix, Carbonmade, or Squarespace. These platforms range from portfolio builders with plenty of features to fully customizable websites. 

Take a bit of time a figure out what the best platform for you is, but remember, you won't know for sure until you try it out yourself. Check out The Pros and Cons of the Top 5 Web Platforms if you would like to learn more about which platform you should choose.

Creating Your Online Portfolio

It's time to pick a template, add your name or logo, contact information, the sentence summarizing your skills and any other details you want on your homepage. Look to others for inspiration. Delete unnecessary templates and pages, and try to keep it simple and easy to navigate.

A general rule is to only pick one or two fonts, unless you really know what you're doing. You'll also generally want to stick with a smaller colour palette consisting of only a few complementary colours to avoid creating too much chaos and subtracting from your portfolios content.

Only add your best work. This could be somebody's first impression of you and you want to make it a good one. Nobody needs to know about all the less-than-perfect designs you've made before, your portfolio is a chance to show off your best work. Having only 4 or 5 pieces in your portfolio is perfecting fine, just make sure their top quality and have plenty of written content and visuals. Lots of artists only promote a few of their most recent works, which allows their portfolio to be constantly updated and fresh for new and old visitors.

One of the most under looked pages on a portfolio is the 'About' page. Start by expanding on the one-sentence summary of yourself that you wrote out when you started. Don't just list your past jobs and technical skills. Tell your story, share your creative focus, include awards, testimonials, add media links to published work, add your contact information, and links to all your social media outlets. It might sound obvious but always check for spelling and grammar mistakes before you finish your portfolio, nothing looks more unprofessional than an error. 

Need more help on creating your about page? Read How To Write an "About Me" Page That Gets You Hired

Promote Your Design Portfolio

How To Create An Impressive Online Portfolio

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Now it's time to get the word out! There's a never-ending stream of ways to get traffic to your website or viewers to your portfolio but you'll have to experiment to find out what works best for you. Try adding your portfolio's URL to your email signature and sharing it on your social media channels to let the world know that your portfolio is here!

Print business cards with your web address and hand them out on the street, comment on everyone of your Facebook friends walls with it. You get the point, there's plenty of ways to get people viewing your portfolio, but if you need some more ideas check out these 74 Ideas to Market Your Website and Get More Website Visitors.

As time goes, tastes will change and trends will end so you must always make sure you continue to update your portfolio regularly, adjusting it towards your goals at the time.

Harlen Malkowich
Apr 26, 2017
By Harlen Malkowich

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