Make your graphic design portfolio stand out with our free guide’s key tips.
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Every graphic designer needs more than a text-only resume when applying for a new job or pitching for freelance work. No matter your experience level, you need a graphic design portfolio website that shows off your best and most recent work, skills, and talent to a potential employer or client. A graphic design portfolio website provides a platform to share your story and demonstrate your unique talents in a crowded marketplace.
Thankfully, you need little more than your graphic design skills and previous works to create your own portfolio website. No coding is required. This guide will show you how to use ready-made tools to customize a site that shows off your personality and creativity. You’ll learn what you should include in your portfolio, how to build your brand online, the best methods for showing off your experience and clients, and how often you should update your portfolio website.
What to include in a graphic design portfolio
Your portfolio should highlight your best work, but also showcase your range of skills and experience. If you are just graduating or an emerging graphic designer who is interested in a variety of work, pick a selection of pieces that show your varied talents, such as typography and logos, web and UI or UX design, photography, illustration, print, or animation. If you have yet to land your first job or client, it’s perfectly acceptable to pick your best projects from school.
If you have more experience, then you can begin to tailor your portfolio toward the type of work you’d like to be doing. Your goals will likely dovetail with the pieces of which you’re most proud, and you can use your portfolio to find similar work.
Try to limit your portfolio’s landing page to four to 10 works. It’s a lot to ask a potential employer or client to sift through everything you’ve ever done. Your portfolio’s landing page should act as a highlight package of your best and most recent projects—just like a written resume might for a non-visual job.
The landing page of your graphic design website is critical. Your landing page should have a clean design and a clear purpose. Stand out by showing your best work and your personality. You’ll want to use a template that features large images, instead of tiny thumbnails that don’t begin to tell your story. A landing page that doesn’t represent the best you have to offer can prevent potential employers and clients from giving you and your services thorough consideration.
While you’ll be judged primarily on the pieces featured in your portfolio, you’ll also want to include two specific pages that are about you. You’ll need an About page with a brief bio that explains your background and your professional goals. You’ll also need a Contact page that provides a way for prospective clients to get in touch with you.
Learn how to build a graphic design portfolio
Branding for graphic design portfolios
A portfolio website can do more than showcase your work. Design portfolios can also give visitors a sense of the designers themselves. Think of creating your online presence as building a brand for yourself. In addition to the work you display, your portfolio can include other elements that show off your personality, creativity, and sense of style. After all, a client is looking not only for someone with the experience and talent required for the job, but also someone with whom they’ll enjoy working. Let your personality shine through and create a brand that helps you stand out from the crowd.
The first decision you’ll need to make in creating your portfolio website is whether to give it a minimalist or maximalist style. A minimalist approach presents a clean, understated look that highlights your work. It’s important to choose your typography carefully because it will stand out against a stark background.
A maximalist style with lots of imagery, bold typography, and interactive elements can quickly grab the attention of any visitor to your site, but requires a great deal of skill so as not to overwhelm and confuse visitors. Done well, a maximalist approach can convey a sense of playfulness and lets the whole of your personality shine through with contrasting elements, striking color combinations, and little to no white space on the page. Maximalism lets you make a bold first impression if you are willing to take the risk.
Similarly, a strong logo or interactive element can go a long way toward creating a unique brand for yourself. Even with a minimalist design, you should try to include an interactive element (e.g., an animation that lets visitors zoom in on an example of your work) that shows your personality. Interactive web design turns passive visitors into active participants and keeps them engaged with your content. The longer someone stays on your website, the more they will learn about you.
How to showcase your experience and past clients
You’ll want to pick your best pieces for your portfolio, but make sure they are also the type of work that interests and excites you, and the kind of projects you’d like to find in the future. The type of work you choose to highlight in your design portfolio will likely result in leads for similar work. If you dabble in a variety of design work, lead with the type of work you want to do. For example, lead with examples of branding and logo designs that you’ve done if that’s the type of work you are looking to continue doing.
If you don’t have enough examples of the specific type of work that you want to focus on, you might include a completed personal project or a work in progress. The work you put out is the work you get—and the elements you highlight within that work are subject to the same philosophy.
To achieve your goals, you’ll want to find a portfolio template that best matches your style. The site layout should support and highlight your work. Avoid overly busy designs that take the focus away from your work. A simple design with a clear purpose of putting your best work front and center is best.
While the focus needs to be on your work, your work cannot speak for itself. Caption your work to include information about the clients and agencies with whom you’ve worked. Be sure to include any awards you might have won. To take visitors inside your design process, try to include earlier sketches and notes that informed the final design. If you have yet to land your first professional gig, then use non-client work, such as personal or school projects.
Best practices for a graphic design portfolio
Regardless of your specific field within graphic design, there are common traits to any effective design portfolio. Follow these best practices to give your portfolio the best chance at success.
Storytelling
Your portfolio needs to tell a story. No matter the types of pieces you feature, adding context to each piece will show potential employers how you might help their business. Describe your creative process and play to your audience. Include information about the objective of the project, your role, and the result it achieved. Be sure to credit any collaborators. Explaining the scope of each project behind each of your pieces gives potential clients direct evidence of the results you can achieve for them.
Number of examples to include
How many examples of your work should you include? Generally, you should include at least four and no more than 10. It depends solely on the confidence you have in your work, and whether you want to showcase a variety of design types. Because you have a limited number of pieces to share, display only your best.
Hero images
Show that you are proud of your past work by using a large, engaging, and high-resolution hero image for each featured work in your portfolio. Hero images are the big images or banners at the top of a site that run the width of the page. Fun details that show your skill and personality are lost when an image is small or compressed into a thumbnail. With a hero image, you can call out interesting details by highlighting specific parts of a project.
Try to use at least one hero image for the first piece featured on the landing page of your portfolio. This will immediately grab the attention of visitors to your site. Take your visitors by the hand and lead them through your gallery of work.
Consistent design
When designing your portfolio website, find a template that allows for a consistent approach, even when showing a variety of your work. A consistent design helps visitors navigate your site more easily and will help keep them on the portfolio pages for longer.
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When to update your graphic design portfolio
Graphic design is an incredibly crowded field, so you need to find a way to draw attention to yourself and stand out. One way to increase the odds of your portfolio website getting seen is to keep it fresh, which begs the question: How often do you need to update your portfolio?
A good guideline is to update your portfolio at least once a year. When you add a new project, you can replace the piece that is your least favorite. It’s also a good idea to look to replace your older pieces and keep the focus on your most recent works, especially if you are growing and improving as a designer. When is a piece too old to include in your portfolio? The answer can vary, but in general you should avoid including anything that’s older than five years.
When you have finished a new piece for a big client that you are really excited about, then that is a perfect time to update your portfolio. There are ways, however, to update your portfolio when you don’t have any new work to add. Fine-tune the layout, arrangement, color palette, logo, typography, or other elements of your site to maintain a modern look. If it’s been a while since you’ve completed a project, you could show a work in progress, from the idea behind it and early sketches to its current stage. And don’t neglect search engine optimization (SEO) tools to increase your odds of having your website discovered by a potential client.
Learn more about when to update your graphic design portfolio