By: Sharon Adekanye (Perxels’ Mentee)
What is a portfolio?
A portfolio is a place or basically a home for all your works, especially your designs. The main purpose of a portfolio is to help show how you approached problems, processes and tools used in your designs.
Dear designers, apart from just solving case studies, wireframing and prototyping; please know that keeping portfolio of all your designs is a vital aspect of your career because it plays out as an asset, which showcases your designs and you as a designers to potential employers and clients because they get to have an idea of how best you approach problems and how you solve those problem.
Just like every company you design websites for and apps that help their clients know much about what they do and how to solve problems for their customers, you also need to create a portfolio for yourself which would help people know more about what you do and how you are an A-star designer that can help solve users problems.
Do I really need a portfolio?
Many designers usually ask why do I necessarily need a portfolio for my designs when my resume has done 95% percent of explaining me as a designer, the design school I attend and my work experience in design companies. The answer is YES you need a portfolio, actually your portfolio is supposed to be 95% and your resume 5% because your resume is like an added advantage to your application, the hiring manager would look at your resume but that’s not enough to know whether you actually know how to design products and solve users problems.
Your design portfolio helps employers and clients to know that they can trust you with designing products for the company and formulating solutions that can help solve their users problems. Moreover, when recruiters ask you to send your works, you don’t just want to rumble mumble some of works and send it as pictures through email; the whole essence of portfolio is to get the best of your designs out of all your design drafts and put it in one folder portfolio which would be sent to recruiters. Basically portfolios are meant to be a compilation of your best works that have strong designs and have probably been reviewed or assessed as a good and eye-catching design.
Let me give you an example of what a portfolio is like, imagine you have a shop where you sell your goods, if you don’t put some of the eye-catching goods on display like in a show glass or a table outside the shop how would your potential customers be attracted to what you sell, people would not have much interest in your goods and this example goes for designers, if you’re all about just designing without documenting your best designs of how you arrived at solutions that help users, you may not meet potential recruiter or clients.
The importance of Design portfolio
Links like Behance, Dribbble and etc. don’t really do justice to how great your designs are because it only shows little highlights of your work but fails to show how did sketches, wireframes, iterations and processes it took to solve your problems, but creating a portfolio for that explains everything
Portfolio are very accessible to get whenever it is required by clients or recruiters rather than sending works in bit thereby making designs look tacky and scattered in the emails of recruiters
The good thing about portfolio is that even when you’re just a junior designer, your best designs you put in your portfolio would have the recruiter thinking you’re a senior designer but showing links like Behance and Dribbble to recruiters would have them seeing some designs they don’t like among other designs they like, thereby leaving them confused on whether to hire you or not.
Portfolio shows your design thinking processes and how you’ve been able to solve users problems
Portfolio helps you to get on trend, because as design trends change you would be able to take out cliché designs and add trending ones.
Portfolio allows you to put your design process into words, because jotting down how you achieved a particular solution helps you understand your own design process much better.
The tips of having a good design portfolio
- Get a good design portfolio sites like adobe portfolio, Wiz, word press etc. and if you’re worried about pricing plans for online portfolios, check out free ones like Google Drive, word press, PDF makers.
- Show your process: Don’t just drop mock-ups of the design, make sure to include the journey of your process, like why you wanted to solve the particular problem, surveys you carried out, user personas etc.
- Your case studies should be easy to read by recruiters and straight to point, don’t ramble and also make the fonts easy to see and give good colours that would immediately attract the recruiters.
- Your design portfolio isn’t your design drafts: Dear designers, do well to differentiate your drafts from your portfolio. Don’t just dump anything into your portfolio, your portfolio is made up of your best designs, recruiters are only going to be impressed by the design that feed their eyes good. So do well to pick your best of best, if possible the ones that have got good feedbacks from users.
- Avoid design clutters: Don’t muddle up your designs in your portfolio, give them space and let them be clear and concise, so that recruiters aren’t pissed at first glance.
- Make portfolio as flexible as possible, because design trends changes and that would help you trash out old trends and put in new trends and also you can fix your portfolio based on your target audience of your employers.
- Feedback helps portfolio, share portfolio to design friends let them tell you what they think should be added or removed because they might just be thinking same way your recruiters would think
- Don’t be carried away by putting more of aesthetics than actual design, while wanting to make your portfolio look beautiful, do not forget that your major reason for portfolio is to showcase your designs so don’t allow your aesthetics to overshadow your designs
- Check all errors, grammatical, wrong spellings, low resolution images, and there you have all portfolio ready.
“A portfolio is the backbone of a creative as it shows what you’re capable of” says graphic and interactive designer Jacob Cass of Just Creative.
It’s a showcase of your blood, sweat, talents and triumphs. It’s your brand, be proud of it. Now go show it off!
