A Portfolio is essential when applying for jobs within the design industry, it is expected that you will have one and it is almost always requested as part of your application alongside your CV and Cover Letter. Portfolios can be provided in different formats, for example a PDF, but the most common way is as a personal website. This website will contain an introduction to yourself, your contact details, your CV and 3-5 examples (case studies) of your design work. Different employers will look for different things within a portfolio so it can be useful to tailor a portfolio to a specific employer, for example leading with the work you have done that is most relevant to that employer.
Portfolios are your chance to show your work and design process to a prospective employer so are very important when looking for a job.
As my portfolio will be a key part of my applications for placement opportunities I wanted to take some time and delve deep into the wealth of articles online offering advice on how to create a portfolio, common mistakes to avoid and best design practices for portfolios. These should give me the best chance to create a good portfolio that shows my work off to its best.
While I was looking for articles and advice on how best to go about creating my portfolio, I came across this book (which was offered as a free e-book download) which offered a lot of advice on several questions on portfolios. For example, why do I need a portfolio? what to include in a portfolio? And should I design my portfolio for web or print? These are all key decisions I need to make so reading this advice should be very useful to me.
Source: https://medium.com/portfolio-principles/the-unofficial-design-portfolio-handbook-674113391bc (Last Accessed 24/12/23)
On the question of why do I need a Portfolio? The first part of the answer was obvious, it is essential to be able to show your work to either attract clients or get hired. People won’t hire a designer without seeing the work they have done in the past; this is to see if the work they do is up to the standard required and to get an idea of what style and method the designer uses. Therefore, to find work a portfolio is key. However, this was not the end of the answer, this book also spoke of how your portfolio could be a tool to build networks within the design community, this was not something I had considered at all, I had been focused on my portfolio as a tool to gain employment not to build networks. To use my portfolio for this purpose I would need to continuously update it with new and meaningful content to turn viewers into followers who are interested in watching my work overtime. While I am not at a point to be producing content on a regular basis it is interesting to look at my portfolio in this new light and see it as more than simply a tool to gain work and instead see its potential as a networking channel.
The next question the book covered was how to start building a portfolio, as a designer I assumed design would be key and the first thing to really get right on a portfolio build. However, in this book starting with the design is considered a pitfall that a lot of designers commonly make and in fact the first thing that you need to get right in a portfolio is the content. The content is the pieces of work and case studies you are going to use your portfolio to show, and thinking it make a lot of sense to get the content right before the design. What most people looking at a portfolio will want to see is the content, the work you have done, and the case studies you have created, therefore, to give viewers of your portfolio what they are looking for you need to have the right content. Design is important a poorly designed portfolio will have potential employers clicking the close button immediately, however the best designed portfolio in the world is no use without content.
Going further with this thought process, and especially as a UX designer I need to consider the user experience of my portfolio. I need to make it easy to navigate, with logical information architecture and an overall enjoyable experience to visit and look through. I need to take the same approach to constructing my portfolio that I do to any of my other design projects, empathising with my users and making sure to provide for their needs, this will give me the best chance of creating a great portfolio.
Interestingly, (to be honest I found all the advice in this book interesting) content is not listed as the most important thing to include in a portfolio. That is your contact details, because as the author rightly points out it is no good having amazing content, a stunning design and loads of people looking at your portfolio if those people cannot reach out to connect with you. A contact page is key and for me I intend to use both a separate contact page with all my contact details as well as including my email address in the footer of all my web pages.
One of the biggest questions I have had since I started thinking about creating a portfolio was how many projects do I need to include and what projects should I include. As a student I have not got a plethora of previous projects to choose from, probably around 6 or so I could choose however, not all of these were my best work, and some don’t hold much relevance to the jobs I want to be applying to. This book advises to include between three and five projects and to concentrate on the work you want to do more of. For me this is more user experience work, so I need to emphasise those aspects of my projects, and I need to select the projects that are best suited to showing that side of my design process off. This advice is the same as our lecturer gave us in this week’s lecture, so I am confident that this is the way to go for my portfolio.
From this week’s lecture and the advice I have found online the key to my portfolio is my content and my content is going to take the form of case studies. I found that The Unofficial Design Portfolio Handbook provided a very simple list of three questions I need to answer in my case studies.
These are:
These are the key questions anyone reading my case studies will want answers to so once I have written my case study these will be good questions to use to check its effectiveness against. Like a set of acceptance criteria for my case studies.