Portfolio Tips

A portfolio of work is essential for any creative field, to demonstrate your skills and interests. We'll break this down into two parts: assembling materials and creating a portfolio website.

1. Assembling Portfolio Materials

You should prepare images and videos of your work so you can have your portfolio materials ready to include with application to jobs, grants, or exhibitions.

Portfolio Media

Collect 10-20 examples of work that illustrate your skills and interests. A good portfolio can include examples of diverse media, but should show a cohesive voice and perspective. Showing similar themes, subject matter, or style can help tie your work together.

Images

  • Prepare a variety of image sizes when exporting work, because different applications will ask for different things.
    • High-resolution: A PDF for vector-based work, or a 300ppi large size image for raster images. Consider how large you might print an image and check it's dimensions in Photoshop.
    • Large web size: 1920px x 1080px (or similar depending on your aspect ratio); the largest size you'll typically need for websites or anything viewed on a screen.
    • 1000px wide: A medium-size image that is often asked for in applications.

  • Tips on photographing paintings and 2D work

    Videos

  • Documenting physcial works or events: definitely get a tripod, and if recording audio, get a microphone. See video and audio pages for more.

  • Edit a short trailer: It's good to have lots of footage to draw from, but juries, hiring boards, and online audiences don't want to watch a twenty minute movie. Edit a 1-2 minute video that shows the gist of your work. This goes for documentation of physcial work or digital time-based or interactive work.
  • Record a tour of screen-based work: Use Quicktime or other screen recording apps to record yourself navigating websites/apps/games/coding projects and the like. You can always edit it down later.
  • Add a soundtrack: Silent videos can be boring, so consider adding some nice instrumental or ambient music from the Free Music Archive

Reels

For filmmakers and animators, it's expected that you will have a short trailer documenting your work overall in addition to specific projects. A reel should feel exciting and in line with the style of your work, edited like a film trailer to advertise your abilities and breadth of work.

Interactive Media

  • Websites, games, and prototypes can be made available online for people to view directly.

Written Materials

  • Artist Statement or Design Philosophy: Depending on what creative field you consider yourself in, you would title and skew this differently, but essentially you should have a brief written summery of your professional interests.
  • Media Checklist
    • Prepare written captions for your main portfolio item, so it's ready to go and adapt for applications. Here's an example:
      • You are what you eat, 2020, video installation. This project was a generative video projected onto a moving food truck that incorporated archival film footage and contemporary news clips to produce abstracted commentary on industrial agriculture.

  • Curriculm Vitae (CV)

    • A CV includes everything you've ever done that is relevant to your career; a resume is a shorter version that is geared to a specific job application.

      • CV Guidelines from the College Arts Association
      • As a designer, this is an opportunity to highlight your design skills with excellent typography and organization, but don't go crazy. Keep color to a minimum and ensure that it looks good if printed in black and white.
      • Prepare a PDF in Word or InDesign, but you may also want to include some of this information on your website as live web text.

      2. Portfolio Websites

      Recommendations are organized according to how much experience you have making websites.

      You could create an account on something like Behance, but people will take you more seriously if you have a personal website like "YourName.com".

      Cost

      Most of these options cost around $100/year. Shared hosting providers like Bluehost will typically give you the first year at a much reduced price, but long term, you should expect to pay more. No-code tools will charge a similar fee, and can also lock you into that ecosystem (e.g. if you build a Squarespae site, you can't move it somewhere else, so you're stuck with whatever they want to charge you).

      A much cheaper option is available if you're willing to do some coding and web development. Scroll all the way down to the section about static site generators which can be run on largely free hosting services, with the only cost being to but a domain name.

      For Beginners

      The following web apps are for non-designers, so they are more limited in terms of customization and advanced features. They're fast an easy to use, but make it clear that you are not a web designer.

    • Squarespace
    • Wix
    • Weebly
    • Carrd (one page sites)

    • MMM.page

      For People with Some Web Experience

    • Webflow

      • This is another web with a GUI, so you don't need to code, but you do need to understand CSS properties for layout and design. The plus side of that is that your site can be very customized and unique.
      • Downside: More expensive than some options.
      • Includes CMS tools for custom post types and back-end blogging etc.

    • Wordpress (with an existing theme)

      • Choose a free or premium theme: you can customize basic things like colors and fonts, and add in custom CSS for more advanced things, but you'll be primarily relying on the layout and functionality of your chosen theme.
      • Beginner's Guide to Wordpress
      • You'll need a domain name and a server that supports databases to install Wordpress— but that means you can shop around for hosting and can move your site at any time. Some of the options above lock you in to hosting with the company providing your visual design tool.

      For Web Developers

      If you want to work in web development or as a freelancer, you want an awesome highly customized website to demonstrate your abilities. These more advanced platforms can also be a great learning opportunity, but will require a lot of time and Googling if you're learning something new.

    • Wordpress (custom theme)

    • Static Site Generators
      • This is by far the cheapest option for a website! Use Netlify or Vercel and you only have to pay for a domain name. (So ~$10/year instead of $100). These hosts will charge you more if you exceed a certain amount of traffic to your site, but that's usually not an issue for personal sites.
      • These use Javascript to ingest file (e.g. Markdown) and transform them into static HTML files, allowing you to use page components (e.g. navbar) and variables and all kinds of cool stuff. Read more on the web design page.
      • Introduction to Static Site Generators
      • Eleventy
      • Jekyll
      • GitHub Pages — Hosts projects on GitHub.io
      • Hugo

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