Designers, remember: your portfolio is a part of your portfolio
Your portfolio matters. Pay attention to what you do with it.
Building a portfolio site can be an interesting proposition, to say the least. I can’t speak for everyone, but most of us don’t love talking about ourselves. (I’m doing it right now, and, well, I’m just a tad uncomfortable about it.) We like broadcasting our creative work to the world for scrutiny and judgment even less.
So when it comes to portfolio sites, many designers go the out-of-the-box route. Sites like behance.net offer plug ’n’ play solutions for designers looking to showcase their work quickly and effortlessly.
But if you’re a digital designer or front-end developer, ask yourself: is “quick and without effort” how you really want people describing your work?
Your portfolio IS your work, not just a container for it.
When I set out to build—or rebuild, technically—my own site, https://ryanhannebaum.com, I first asked myself, What do I want this site to say about me as a creative individual? A few answers came to mind pretty immediately, in terms of my preferred style: minimalist design, a mostly grayscale palette, and intentional micro-animations. (Is that a term? I’m making that a term.)
But as I continued to plan, a broader realization started to take shape in my mind: I was building my own site from scratch, not just because I’m a control freak when it comes to UI (though that’s true), but because utilizing a prebuilt platform would, in and of itself, defy what I hoped to convey about myself and my work.
You see, I’m what some might call a “generalist,” in the sense that my creative talents and interests make up for, in sheer breadth of capabilities, what they lack in loftiness of peaks within specific—but sparse—categories. Now, this is by my design (no pun intended), yet that fact has made it extremely important that I tell my story in such a way that highlights that personal attribute as a feature, rather than a bug, of my employability.
And that’s how everything came into sharp focus for me as it pertains to my portfolio.
Before anyone browsed the projects I chose to promote, they would be browsing my portfolio site itself, building judgment and assumptions in their minds prior to any conscious attempts to judge my showcased work. So I went all in, from scratch. I sketched wireframes; I organized my available content; I built up my code environment—using Laravel, if you were curious; and I designed the UI on top of the layout I’d wireframed.
But the through-line of all that work was that I was telling my story, using the very tools I wanted to show off in my various works. I used the copy to speak in my conversational, satirical style. I put my animation skills to work making my graphical elements move in a very intentional way, to act as interactive guideposts for users as they browse. I laid the content out in the strict order I wanted said users to navigate the site, leaning on my UX experience. Even some of the invisible aspects of the project were done in a way I could enthusiastically advocate for—such as my choice to control all my content in a CMS (content management system; in this particular case, I went with Contentful), to embody my belief in taking the long view when it comes to design and development, future-proofing as much as possible to maximize client impact. Even when my client…is me.
And I say this to you not just because I just got done with my own site; I say this to you as someone who has hired numerous designers. And I (clearly) have a somewhat different perspective than, say, Jamal Nichols, who made a very reasonable counterargument about the worth and impact—or lack thereof—of portfolio construction. While I don’t dismiss designers out-of-hand who have stagnant or otherwise lackluster portfolio sites or documents, if the projects they promoted met a certain threshold, it certainly raises my levels of skepticism about their levels of give-a-shit when it comes to design intentionality. As Mr. Nichols rightly points out, there are valid reasons for unimpressive portfolios—most notably time constraints on already-overworked designers. But I can throw a dart and hit a designer who can make things look good. I care far more, as a creative director, about finding designers who know how to make things look right for a given purpose. And in that sense, a portfolio’s design tells me just as much as the work within it.
Your portfolio isn’t an image gallery; it’s a portfolio.
With all of this said, I obviously am able to build a website because I have the technical background and chops to do so, which is not common for many of you designers out there. I get that. But my perspective isn’t restricted to custom sites; you can apply the core of my realizations from my own experiences even if you choose a boilerplate (no offense intended) platform to house your work.
In fact, there are good reasons to lean on those platforms, such as leveraging built-in discoverability advantages, as Melinda Crow points out.
My core realization, stripped of any commentary about form or technology, is to treat your portfolio, wherever it lives, with the intentionality and care you undoubtedly want people to see in all of your work. Use the tools at your disposal to customize what you can, the way you want, and take the time to do it the right way: your unique way.
And don’t just plaster screenshots of your stuff on a wall and call it good. Provide context, and use assets intentionally in order to craft a narrative about your progression as a designer, your methods for executing client projects, or whatever else you want users to take away.
Because no matter where or how you put together your portfolio, the very first entry in it is going to be your portfolio itself. And it is always going to be, for better or worse, one thing for certain…
Yours.
