- Featured article
- People at Skills360 21 - Feb 2025 | 10 min read
As a graphic designer, your design portfolio is a visual representation of your skills, creativity, potential and hard work. It is what lands you freelance opportunities and helps you win over clients.
A strong and compelling portfolio doesn't just showcase your work, it reflects your personality, thought process, design principles and so much more. Here is a step-by-step guide we offer to our students at Skills 360, to help them build an impactful graphic design portfolio.
Before compiling all your work, ask yourself “who am I targeting and why?” Knowing your audience and purpose will help you figure out the structure, color, aesthetics and content of your portfolio.
If you’re applying for a full-time design job, we recommend showcasing a variety of projects. Include different niches like branding, website design, print, motion graphics and more.
If you’re trying to attract freelance clients, tailor your portfolio to your clientele’s niche, like small businesses, startups, etc. Make sure such portfolios reflect your affordability, creativity and practicality.
Not every project you’ve completed deserves a spot on your portfolio. When deciding what to include, handpick 8-12 pieces of your best work that align with your niche. Select projects that include moodboards, website redesigns, social media campaigns and before & after data.
Clients hate nothing more than unorganised and messy presentations. That is why at Skills 360, we recommend a couple of tools to our students that can help them create bespoke presentations.
A strong portfolio explains the design process from the beginning to the end. With each project, make sure you incorporate an entire care study that includes the following:
Presenting your designs using mockups can make your work appear more realistic and professional. Use tools like Placeit, or Artboard Studio to showcase how your designs would look in real-world scenarios, such as on a website, a billboard, a business card, or a smartphone screen.
Your portfolio reflects you as a brand, so it's important to maintain consistency when designing one. Use a consistent color scheme, typography and grid system to unify your work. You can use Coolors.co to generate color palettes for your portfolio, and Figma and Sketch to implement grids. It's recommended to choose a simple 12-column grid for showcasing web designs.
To ensure that your portfolio reaches a wider audience, make sure you make it available in different formats. Use tools like InDesign and Canva to create PDF forms of your portfolio. Organize it using indexes, headings and sections so it’s easily readable and understandable by the client.
You can create a dynamic, 90-second showreel to highlight your skills. For this, After Effects can help you animate transitions between projects. You can upload your reel to platforms like YouTube and embed it in your online portfolio.
Get curated emails on out of class learning and work on your skills on your free time.