Designer Portfolio Website Guide & Tips

What Is a Designer Portfolio?

Whereas most job applications require just the submission of a resume and cover letter, designers are different and will require a portfolio of past work in order to show off what they’ve done and project what they can do if they’re hired. Designers don’t work in black and white, and your portfolio should be a splash of color to complement your other application documents, regardless of what type of designer you happen to be.

Although certain types of designers (fashion designers are the prime example) may still sometimes need a physical portfolio, today’s design portfolios have migrated online, either on portfolio sites like Dribbble or Behance, or simply as websites the designer constructs (with no small amount of help from a platform with a user-friendly CMS, content management system.)

Many of the principles involved in resumes and cover letters apply to portfolios as well. That includes the hiring director’s giving it a cursory glance rather than hours of deep study, especially at first. The portfolio should also be tailored as much as possible to the types of jobs for which you’re designing: don’t send bridal wear sketches to get a job at Carhartt. You want your portfolio’s viewer to understand your design process and appreciate your capabilities, but you also want your portfolio to show that you understand the brand to which you are applying and how you can fit into the company’s overall design scheme.

Freelancers by nature will have more generalized portfolios; just make sure that the work on exhibit shows off your personal brand (and, yes, niche) as well as the range of creations you can devise. Generally, you’re going to need to find a golden mean between range and focus, but always with the balance tilted to focus. You want the people viewing your portfolio to be reassured that you can do the type of work they need done.

How to Build Designer Portfolio Projects

Of course, if you’re going to have a portfolio, you’re going to have to have projects to show what you can do. If you’ve been working in the field for a long time, you’re going to have an embarrassment of riches from which to choose, and the question you’ll face will be what to exclude. For someone in the early stages of their careers, or those just finishing school, there’s obviously going to be a far smaller corpus of work upon which to draw.

Your choice will likely fall between projects you completed in school and those you undertook on your own, even if they were done for the purposes of keeping yourself out of trouble by giving you something upon which to work. You shouldn’t rule the latter out a priori, assuming you put some heart and soul into the work and it shows you off to good advantage. The same can be said of little freelance projects you may have picked up here and there: assuming they’re good and show you off in a favorable light, by all means, consider including them in your portfolio. They represent real-world work, and are valuable to hiring directors as a result, but, this can’t be said enough, only consider them if they’re your best work. A sloppy pizzeria menu isn’t going to impress anyone.

Those starting out will likely have more school projects than anything else in their portfolios. This is perfectly normal, and hiring directors are aware of this fact. Most design programs include a capstone project as part of their curricula, including Noble Desktop, whose certificate programs are designed to allow students to develop portfolio-worthy work as they acquire their skills. This makes for a very good reason for putting effort and heart into student projects, as your future job search is going to depend on them.

Choosing Designer Portfolio Pieces

Although there are variations across the spectrum of design careers, the largely common-sense rules for selecting designer portfolio pieces apply pretty much to any creative field. The first rule to bear in mind – you’ll see it splattered across the internet ad nauseam – is quality over quantity. In most fields, you can get by with as few as three portfolio projects. This should enable you to select your own best work (and, when possible, match it to the people you know will be examining your portfolio.) Don’t fall into the trap of choosing not to choose and putting up a dozen unrelated pieces that will only confuse viewers. Your portfolio is about your personal brand, and you should have an idea of what that is when you select what work you want to show.

You want, however briefly, for your portfolio to tell a story. That’s going to be your story, recounted through your work. To this end, you’re also going to want to demonstrate your process, rather than just results. If you’re a fashion designer, that means including such things as mood boards; if you’re a UX designer, that can mean including shots of early paper wireframes. The people looking at your portfolio want to know how you work, not just what you did, which means you’re going to want to select pieces that can help you show that. By creating case studies (with judicious addition of text), you’re revealing much more about yourself than nothing but finished projects can communicate.

Choosing a Designer Portfolio Website

Now that you’ve selected which projects you want to display, you have to decide how you’re going to display them. Be prepared to encounter more options than you know what to do with, and probably something of a headache as you decide which platform to select.

Your first option is simply to create a website of your own, building it from scratch. You’ll obviously get exactly what you want that way, but it presupposes the ability to code, and, of course, you’re an artist and can’t be bothered with learning coding languages.

Fear not. This is where the portfolio-building platform comes to the rescue, with content management systems (CMS) that make it possible for you to manipulate images and text without actually having to know any code. Alternatives abound, from sites like Dribbble and Behance that are geared specifically to creating portfolio websites (you will probably want to investigate the Dribbble Pro paid tier if you want to go with Dribbble for your website), through to less specialized but creative-friendly website builders such as Wix or Squarespace, on which you can have a modest site up and running in a matter of hours. Other options include Dunked, Cargo, Adobe Portfolio, and, yes, even good old WordPress.

These website builder sites generally operate by offering you a selection of templates from which to choose. You can then customize the template before inserting your projects. It’s not quite child’s play (although children can do some amazing things on computers these days), but it’s eminently doable with a little patience. You may even surprise yourself with the professional-looking results you can cook up as an amateur web designer.

There’s a third possibility as well: barter. If you don’t want to be bothered with constructing your own website (perhaps because you have a very specific vision that can’t be accommodated by a Squarespace template), you can always go to a professional web designer. That can cost money, but remember that you may have a service that can be useful to web designers. Exchanging services for services is one of the oldest ways of doing business and can be a great way for people starting out to get professional work done without having to shell out funds that may be short.

While you're setting up your site, you should definitely consider the added expense of getting a personalized URL (ideally yourname.com). That means purchasing your own domain name and maybe matching it to your email and LinkedIn addresses, which will make it easy to find you on all these different platforms.

Building a Designer Portfolio Website

Once you’ve got all your pieces sorted out, your next step is actually assembling the site. The first thing it needs is a landing page (it can or cannot be your home page) that is going to grab the site visitor’s attention. This landing/home page is the equivalent of the summary section of your resume, and, if it’s not good enough to land viewers in the however few seconds they allot to portfolios, you’ve lost your case. Thus give it some very serious thought, and make sure that it shows off your best and most arresting work. Use fonts and colors and every tool at your disposal to create something unique.

In addition to an image that is going to hook the site visitor, the home page should also include an easy-to-understand menu that will allow people to navigate the site without a learning curve. Choose legible fonts, make the buttons easy to locate, and, for pity’s sake, make sure that the buttons work.

You’ll then have to arrange your work. Show it one project at a time, presenting each project as a case study from back when it was just a gleam in your eye to its conclusion. If you can report tangible results about how the project affected sales figures (for example) by all means include these at the end. Those are important, although giving the site visitor a walk through your creative process is just (if not more) important. Be concise with the text that accompanies the photos: you don’t want to drown your entrée in sauce, and you want your viewers engaged visually, not verbally.

This brings up the question of search engine optimization (SEO), the tricks that get you to finish higher in the search results on, most especially, Google. This comes down to the function you wish your portfolio site to have: do you want it to attract customers from the vast yet barren cosmos of the internet, or do you want a site to which people will come after having heard of you, either through a job application or after having stumbled upon you on LinkedIn or some other platform? If you wish to go the former route, be aware that you’re biting off a lot, the details of which are beyond the scope of this article. If you wish to be more modest and pursue the latter route, you should still be attentive to the placement of keywords you’ve culled from pursuing job descriptions in your field. You can’t lose by mixing them into the text you include in your portfolio (this would include your About Me page as well.)

That leaves the question of how many projects to include. It’s trite, but it still applies: think quality rather than quantity and also think cohesively. Three really good projects is enough for a portfolio, especially for someone who’s just starting out. If you have more content than that’s of the same quality, you may consider including it as well, but only if it really is that good, and, then, think of six and ten as lower and upper limits. If you’re still at the beginning of your career, you’re obviously going to include student projects, but you can also include projects you cooked up on your own, providing that they can document your creative process and really are good. They can even show hiring directors that you have a sense of fantasy and can be creative in your off-hours. But make sure it’s good. Don’t include quasi-selfies of your friends in the backyard wearing your homemade clothes.

In addition to your actual work and a home page, you’re going to require an About Me page. Yes, that’s going to mean rehashing all the same information as is in your resume and LinkedIn profile. You can be briefer here and include a LinkedIn link and perhaps an uploadable .pdf resume to avoid covering all the same ground one more time all over again. That will open up some space for testimonials and other ventures into shameless self-promotion.

Finally, you should include an all-important call-to-action on your website. Be sure to provide a contact form that will make it possible for people to reach you at the touch of a button rather than making them search for your contact information on your About Me page.

Polishing a Designer Portfolio Website

Once you’ve got everything organized and set up and are ready for the grand ribbon-cutting ceremony to open your online website, you should go through the whole site all over again and eliminate anything that’s unnecessary. If you have six projects, ask yourself if they are all really that good. Are there too many visual or verbal frou-frous in the way of your message? Be ruthlessly honest with yourself, and, when in doubt about something, get rid of it. “Is this going to make someone want to hire me?” is the question you should repeatedly ask yourself. If it doesn’t, it shouldn’t be in your portfolio.

Only then is it time to spit-polish your efforts and make them sparkle with all the brilliance and fire of a proverbial flawless diamond. Flawless should, indeed, be the first keyword. You’re a designer, which means you’re supposed to have a sense of how things look. So go back through your website and make sure that the text you want lined up does indeed line up and that links function properly. (Hiring directors are notorious for their dislike of dead links.) Put your text through a grammar checker and have someone proofread it for you. You don’t want anything to look slapdash; you’re aiming for perfection.

Then it’s time to get feedback. Sure, go ahead and show your efforts to your friends and family. They may not be overly critical (in all fairness to your friends and family, they may not be interested enough to be that critical), but some positive reinforcement might help you at this uncertain stage of the process. That kind of input, however, can’t take the place of a professional opinion from someone in the field who has experience looking at designers’ portfolios. For students preparing their first portfolios while still in school, an excellent resource is a teacher or mentor. Noble Desktop students in all of its certificate programs, including UI Certificate, the Web Design Certificate, or even the Motion Graphics Certificate, are able to receive this kind of help as part of the school’s 1-on-1 mentoring program, which includes a portfolio review.

Only then should you go live with the site. But remember: now that you have the site, you’re going to have to keep it up and up-to-date. That means adding new projects as soon as you have them, keeping your About Me and resume pages updated, and perhaps adding such features as a blog to ensure a flow of fresh content into the site. Websites go stale faster than Krispy Kreme doughnuts; one of your jobs is to make sure your hot sign is always on.

Learn the Skills to Become a Designer at Noble Desktop

If you wish to become a designer, Noble Desktop, a tech and design school based in New York that teaches worldwide thanks to the wonders of the internet, is available to give you the education you need to get started in this exciting field. Noble teaches certificate programs in numerous aspects of design and the technology that makes design possible in the contemporary world. These certificate programs offer comprehensive instruction in their topics and will arm you for the job market in whichever aspect of design interests you.

Noble has certificate programs in graphic design (the Adobe trio of Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator), digital design (the main troika of Adobe programs plus Figma for UI design), UX & UI design, and motion graphics. All these programs feature small class sizes in order to make sure that each student receives ample attention from the instructor, and can be taken either in-person in New York or online from anywhere over the 85% of the Earth’s surface that is reached by the internet (plus the International Space Station.) Classes at Noble Desktop include a free retake option, which can be useful as a refresher course or as a means of maximizing what you learn from fast-paced classes. Noble’s instructors are all experts in their fields and often working professionals whose experience is invaluable when they mentor students in the school’s certificate programs 1-to-1.

Noble offers further design courses that are briefer than the certificate programs. You may also wish to consult Noble’s Learning Hub for a wealth of information on how to learn to be a designer.