Your Portfolio, Your CV

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For a designer, your Portfolio is your Curriculum Vitae (CV) and believe it or not, a good portfolio pays well. Most designers are not much keen on working on their portfolios (like me ) and they prefer posting website links to check. That may be the easy way out, as obviously if your Employer can check your site, why can’t he check that? But I must say that is not the right way of presenting your portfolio. Portfolios should be made keeping in mind accessibility, ease and distinction.

Portfolio Comparisons
http://www.ndesign-studio.com/portfolio/
This is an example of easily navigatable portfolio. The user has clearly categorily aligned all his designs and presented them in a nice manner. Furthermore, appreciate the fact that none of his designs seem out of order of the original template he is using. 

Coming to the next one – http://www.steveleggat.com/
This guy surely is a great designer. This is our Example no.2. The navigation is not that apparent, however the user surely puts his most important works on the main page, so that anyone browsing his site, comes to see directly what he’s made of. Plus appreciate the fact that he only keeps the designs that are his best. This is another technique. Displaying all your designs might not be a good idea as it would slow down your site’s loading time.

Our Final Discussion today is about – http://www.badboy.ro/portfolio/
This is again a great designer’s work. However this portfolio have the defects mentioned above. The designer has put so many images on the page that it would be very hard to load so many images properly on a slow connection. Half of the images will fail to load. This is not a good way of making a portfolio work. No matter how good his/her designs maybe.

So after this fair comparison here’s what we conclude.
Portfolio is an asset for any designer. Therefore his portfolio should speak for itself. Noone would rate you just on your designs, you got to be creative, emphatic and substantial, and for that you need a well organised, distinctive portfolio. The importance of a nice, fast loading portfolio is therefore immense.

Here is what you should keep in mind when designing your Portfolio

- Images in PNG Preferrably or High-Resolution JPGs, with no image greater than 24Kb for Logos and small designs and a Maximum of 100Kb for Bigger ones.
- Keep your portfolio organised in categories, and distribute it to pages but don’t keep more than 7 images on a single page.
- Describe your designs. Tell the viewers what did you kept in mind while designing them. A simple tagline would do.
- Ask your clients to review the design you gave them, and post some positive testimonials on your portfolio – no more than 3 though (You’ll be exaggerating otherwise).
- Keep the size of your page manageable and browser compatible. Flash and controls should be avoided when it comes to delivering portfolio.

That should do.

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