your portfolio is the most important thing when you are looking for a job, it is even more important than your resume since most recruiters look at your resume after they complete looking at your portfolio and decide to go ahead with you. According to a survey, more than 80% of hiring managers consider an online portfolio to be essential while evaluating graphic designers. Portfolio has now become one of the most important factors for companies and startups when hiring graphic designers. In this article, we will discuss how to create a Graphic designer portfolio of your own and some tips around a Graphic designer portfolio.
How to Make a Graphic Designer Portfolio?
Follow the step-by-step guide given below to create a Graphic Designer Portfolio of your own:
Step 1: Research
Even before designing your portfolio, you must have a clear vision about what are your career goals, what companies you are targeting, and what niche you want to start working with. Graphic design is a vast field and there are many sub-categories in graphic design like brand logo designing, motion graphics designing, packaging designing, etc. Choose the niche you want to start with and later you are passionate about.
Step 2: Select a Website Builder and a template
Once you have decided what your career goals are and what types of companies you are targeting, next we can start creating the website using website builders. They are many website builders like Hostinger, Go daddy, WordPress that you can use of getting pre built templates, you can also assign this task to any freelancer web developer. Also while choosing a domain name for your website, remember that the most optimal domain name is to have your own name because when you will communicate to companies, it is will be easier to remember your portfolio and access it.
Step 3: Customize design uniquely
Once you have a simple template we can then customize it to make it unique.to make your portfolio stand out from crowd, not only your projects but also the portfolio design itself plays an important rule, so make sure to have a clean and unique UI. While being unique make sure that your user experience does not take a toll. The simple rule of thumb is to follow all the design principles in your portfolio design like you do in your graphic designs.
Step 4: Add Projects
Once you are done with designing your template, you can start adding projects in form of case studies in your portfolio. Important thing to remember here is that not all your projects have to be added on your portfolio, your clients won’t have time to go though all your projects so make sure to add your top 5-10 projects to your portfolio.
Step 5: Explain your work
It is not enough to simply paste pictures of your projects and aspect the clients to take time and understand the context, so once you have your projects added provide a short summary of that project and make it clickable so that when a client is interested about one single project he or she can click it and that would take them to a page where you can explain the project in detail. On the main page make sure to keep the text as less as possible and later you can explain your projects in their individual pages.
Step 6: Provide your contact information
Recruiters have a lot of things to process and a lot of portfolios to review so our job is to make it easier for them to contact us in order to increase our chances of getting recruited. A lot of recruiters do not want to waste time thinking about how to contact you. For that we can create a clear, big and visible contact section in our portfolio. This contact section must include your email address and link to your other social media accounts.
Step 7: Feedback and iterate
Similar to what happen in graphic design, feedback is critical for creating a professional appearing portfolio. Iterating unit you find a perfect portfolio is important, for that you can reach out professional graphic designers on their socials are ask them to review your portfolio and iterate accordingly until you get a professional appearing portfolio that follow all the major design principles.
Guidelines for Graphic Designer Portfolio
Following are some important guidelines that you must follow while designing your Graphic designer Portfolio:
1. Show your work:
The recruiter is not here to know about you personal background, also it is not possible for the recruiter to believe that you are a motion graphics designer until you can back it up with some professional designs. Therefore, make sure to keep your work as the focus and other things on the background in your portfolio.
2. Use a simple background:
The background of your Portfolio should be as simple as possible, the best choices are either white or black. If you are using dark mode version you can try subtle shades of color or if you want to use some particular color, try a very light shade of it. Also note that sometimes being too sleek on your website can appear that you are expensive to hire, so avoid being sleek.
3. Domain name:
While deciding the domain name, sometimes we use nicknames which is not very professional. Always try getting a domain name of your name because when you will communicate to companies who see your portfolio, it is will be easier to remember your portfolio by your name and access it.
4. Socials, Blogs and Videos:
In your contact section itself, other than your email and contact details, add your socials including links to Dribble, Behance, LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium and YouTube. If you are creating content like writing articles or making videos, that is an additional benefit so make sure to have a small section for those articles or videos.
5. Work in progress:
Since as a Graphic designer, you will be working on newer and newer projects, your portfolio must also keep on updating. Do not consider your portfolio as done, it must be update with any important project you design, or with any significant achievement you complete.
Some Additional Tips
Other than the guidelines mentioned above, follow these tips to create a better graphic designer portfolio:
- Present yourself as a one person company instead of trying to look like a studio.
- Being too sleek on your website can make you look expensive to hire.
- Leave people wanting more by selecting the images you display.
- When in doubt, choose the simplest way for everyone to understand.
- Focus on Search Engine Optimization so that you are more discoverable to clients who search for designers online.
Conclusion
In this article we discussed how to create a Graphic designer portfolio of your own and also some tips around Graphic designer portfolio. Portfolio is your chance to create a good impression in the mind of the recruiter, it is your first pitch for why you should be hired so make sure to spend good time on your portfolio and come up with a professional looking portfolio. Make sure to follow the points mentioned in the article in order create a professional and well designed graphic designer portfolio for yourself.
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