What makes a good portfolio is a question that everyone asks themselves or searches online. Whether it’s making a cv, showcasing artwork in A3 or having an online presence, these are all effectively the same thing as its about selling yourself as a person. A portfolio is a person showcasing their own work in their own creative way. The portfolio has 4 main stages Plan (what are you looking to achieve?) > Content (what will you include?) > Personality (what is your story?) > Maintenance (always room to improve).
I will be looking at an online website portfolio as this is how a web designer/developer sells themselves.
Planning
Have a plan or rough idea of what you want your website to look like is always a great start. Always best with a bit of paper, make wireframes and a design plan. Personally, I normally plan it out in my head and change my mind a billion times during development. From this you can get an idea of which language is best used depending on how complex the design is. Plan ahead for which work is going to be included, no point in building a massive complex portfolio website for 3 pieces of work to be added to it.
Content
Showing off your work is important but making is tasteful is more important. No point in going to the trouble of designing a portfolio website to throw all your work into it. The main purpose of a portfolio is selling yourself. There is a lot of mixed recommendations when it comes to what sort of work to show. Most recommendations are to only show your best work and although I agree with showing your best work, I do disagree with only showing it. I chose to show where I started in my HNC with probably my worst work in my portfolio. At that time, I liked dark backgrounds, border boxes (no idea what I was thinking?) and even worse I thought they were cool. I chose this as I have displayed it as a case study type portfolio where I can tell my story of this is where I started and can show my development process from origin to where I am now. I got this idea from working commercially as this is what some companies do to show their work to drum up other business and advertise themselves. As with a personal portfolio, some do this very well and fail at this. The bigger companies tend to go into a lot more detail with briefs and content, but I wanted to keep mines short and simple to the point. Context is important, if you have a mobile app show it in a mobile device and not just on website screenshots. Including a CV is also a good idea as well as social sites and a GitHub. Social media and GitHub are other ways to showcase your work. Personally, I am a massive fan of an interactive CV, its different and eye catching if done correctly.
Personality
As important it is to showcase work and projects made within education. It is also vitally important to take time away from this and show yourself. Show the parts of your personality that isn’t in your work. What do you like to do when you’re not working? What other skills do you have? Introduce yourself, tell your story. Much like a CV, use this space to tell future employers about yourself, be technical, creative, discuss how you gained your skills. Show your passion and summarise your background, how did you get here?
Show projects you have done out with education if there are any, show things you are working on now or parts of projects you may have started but not yet finished.
Maintenance
Most importantly, your portfolio is never complete. There is always room for improvement. It requires to be updated with more work as you progress whether it be your own projects or freelance projects. Most commercial companies own the work you do for them so not always able to update your personal portfolio with this, but you can point that out at interviews. As you add more content in you would need to keep in mind to also remove older content. There’s no point in having everything you’ve ever done, too bulky.
There are some really cool portfolio websites out there. These are some of my favourites.
rleonardi
Yul Moreau
My Poor Brain
Toy Fight
