January and February were certainly busy months and went by in a blur. When I wasn’t digging my car out of several feet of snow, I was dedicating my time to updating my online portfolio. While doing so, something became blatantly obvious and now I feel the need to pass this information on to other Graphic Designers. If there is one tip I can give to you for a successful online portfolio, it’s this.
As you complete projects, update your portfolio – do not wait!
As a designer, there are so many different aspects of your online portfolio that need attention. Out of all your projects, which do you display? Once you narrow the list down, how do you categorize them? By client, specific project, or design type? What should you display for a specific project to catch visitors attention? The list goes on and on. Below are a few examples of the different ways your designs can be displayed.
Once you have your portfolio figured out it’s important to keep up the maintenance so you’ll never need to start from square one again. This is where I went wrong; I had not updated my portfolio in over a year and a half. Let me put this in perspective, within the past year I’ve worked on 90 projects at the office alone. This does not include any of the personal designs I’ve created, so you can imagine how much work I had to do. As the days went by I became extremely stressed and felt it was important to relay this important tip to my fellow designers.
If there are issues keeping you from doing this, schedule one day a month to update your work. In the long run, this will save you much more maintenance and prevent you from rushing. If you don’t have new projects to add, it doesn’t hurt to re-organize your work and determine if there’s a better way to display everything now that you’ve been updating more frequently.
You never know who is looking to hire you and when you’ll get called in for a surprise interview. I hope you’ll take my one tip for a successful online portfolio to heart and update more often than not. Do you have any helpful tips when it comes to your portfolio? Let me know in the comments and make sure to add a link to your work!
See my newly updated portfolio here!