Crafting your Designer Porfolio
Traditional designer portfolios were just a basic presentation of the work of an artist, presented in a folder or binder. These days, design portfolios are online, and creating a good website is key. When it comes to creating a designer portfolio for your work, it is important that you craft something that makes you stand out from the crowd. There is a lot of competition for lucrative graphic design positions, which is why your online portfolio needs to incorporate aspects of a resume, functional website, and a work of art all in one.
One thing to remember for your online designer portfolio is that it is online. This means that users will expect and desire certain functions as well as instinctive navigation tools. In other words, create a portfolio that is not so creative as to be user unfriendly. It is not supposed to be a hide and seek game for people to figure out how to view your work and information about your corresponding experiences.
However, this does not mean you cannot be a little creative with layout. There is almost an endless amount of ways you can structure the information on your site. For example, you can have images in a sort of ferris wheel, similar to how many companies and ads display rotating products.
Some design portfolio examples I am fond of include one with an image by the artist to a building, but each window of the building is something that can be clicked on, and will bring you to another portfolio piece. Another example I liked was of a designer portfolio that had a picture of a desk with digital sticky notes indicating all the different projects they had completed. The sticky notes flew down when you pressed the screen and then up when you choose an individual one, reiterating the fact that the site was for interactive design.
Remember that a graphic design portfolio needs to contain information as well as images. Making sure any words you post are professionally formatted without grammatical or spelling errors is important, just as it would be for a resume.
Finally, even if you have the most functional out of all web design portfolios, no one will be attracted to it if it is not artistic and eye catching. Pick a theme that represents you, work around that, and stand out from the crowd.