5 Tips for a Job Winning Portfolio
As a creative professional, you want to work for innovative companies and produce award winning work, right?. Of course! But no matter how talented and sharp you are, if your portfolio doesn't represent you well, it's going to be tough to land that kind of job. Do yourself, and your career, a favor by making sure you have the following list of portfolio-enhancing tips nailed down. Doing so will ensure you are easy to discover and hard to ignore when hiring manager and recruiters are looking for a high caliber designer.
Get your portfolio online
With the exception of in-person meetings, your portfolio is most effective when it's online. Hiring managers and recruiters love being able to click a link and see a candidate's work, as opposed to opening an email with dozens of attachments. Online portfolios let them quickly view your work, get an impression of what you bring to the table and share your work with others involved in the hiring process. Besides being more organized and professional looking, an online portfolio is easier to find and ideal for showing off animations, 3D renderings and other fluid mediums of work. If you don't have your portfolio online yet, Coroflot.com is a great place to start.
Make your talents easy to appreciate
Your online portfolio often makes a first impression for you, so it should present your work in a simple and straight forward way. A clean grid of large thumbnail images, labeled with dates and project titles, allows for easy browsing and consumption. When hiring managers can get a good understanding of your talents, style and aesthetic, they can make more informed decisions about whether or not you are right for a job opportunity. Make sure your online portfolio includes an overview page that clearly identifies each of your projects.
Send the right message with your portfolio
The ideal portfolio shows off an accurate range of your skills and passions. Each project should reflect an established area of your expertise or practice so your core set of skills is easy to identify. You may want to include a project that pushed you outside your comfort zone because you are proud of it, but if it doesn't represent work you can consistently deliver on deadline, it's best to leave it out. Projects like that are better left for conversations when a future employer asks about your passions and pursuits outside of work.
Position yourself as a problem solver
Hiring managers are looking for creative professionals who can improve a company, brand or project with their work. Your portfolio should tell the story of the challenges you've addressed and overcome in the past, and how the results benefited your employer. Some of this information, such as improved conversion rates from new landing page designs, are better left for your resume, but your projects should position you as a creative thinker, capable of tackling projects and producing innovative solutions.
Highlight what sets you apart
Now that your portfolio is online, well organized and tells an accurate story of how you'll impact a company's bottom line, you must set yourself apart from your competition by showing how your work goes the extra mile. Insightful projects with conceptual foundations, multiple layers of value that leverage a variety of techniques will ensure the viewer remembers your work over everyone else's. Take the time to put that additional thought, planning and analysis into your work and you'll be chosen over the competition every time.