Building Your Portfolio Website: Six Things to Never Do

photo: pandoro

So, you've got a corefolio posted; you've put together a nice PDF sampler; you've printed out a gorgeous little book to take to interviews. You're working your networks, both real and virtual, and so far...not much. Potential employers are looking over your work, and maybe they like what they see, but somehow this isn't translating into more gigs, or that one crucial interview.

One possible answer to these woes is a personal portfolio website. They've been around for a while now, and emails from colleagues in the creative professions are increasingly signed with a short list of URLs in addition to a Yours Truly--with good reason.

Group sites like Coroflot, AIGA and others offer instant visibility and searchability, and for that reason they are indispensable. Many recruiters and working designers will tell you, however, that such postings by themselves aren't quite enough to make a hiring call, and given the option, they'll move on to someone with additional sources of information. A portfolio website can be the perfect next source, and given the relative ease of creating one these days, they're rapidly becoming an expected part of any designer's self-marketing plan.

The problem is, they're so easy to get wrong. After listening to years of complaints about some of the visual garbage recruiters and seniors have had to sort through, I decided to seek some specific answers about what separates a job-winning portfolio site from a confusing mess.

Miles Begin is a staff designer at Pollen Design, a small product consultancy in New York City (full disclosure: I freelanced for Pollen a few years back, before Miles hired on), and as the designated portfolio reviewer, he looks through around 15 PDF portfolios a week from hopeful applicants and aspiring interns.

Speaking over the phone last week, Miles was able to immediately confirm a few suspicions: that the fraction of applicants with web portfolios is large and growing (about 40% of applicants have them now, by his estimation); that he, and many in his situation, prefer websites to PDFs alone, because of the clearer picture they paint of a designer's personality and process; and that many of these sites are horrific, but in easily avoidable ways.

As with so many things in design, and real life, getting a portfolio website right seems to be less a matter of what you do than what you don't. Compiling Miles' observations together with other comments I've heard over the years, a few clear prohibitions seem like a good place to start. Here are six of them.

1. Don't think you're a web designer unless you actually are.

This is the Achilles heel of many creative professionals: the belief that being competent in one creative capacity qualifies you for another. Most of us recognize that a great cinematographer probably won't be such a great architect, but a huge number of industrial, graphic, interior, and other designers seem to forget this rule, and try to build a great website from scratch.

I know I did: my first go around a few years back, I holed up in my room for about a month, teaching myself Dreamweaver, calling up friends to ask them what exactly a Style Sheet was, and learning a lot in the process. It was fun, and engaging, and taught me plenty of useful skills, but the resulting website was utter crap.

"There's a difference between showing you're a good designer and making a bold statement that you don't really have the tools to make," says Begin. The problem with building a site from scratch, unless you're already skilled at web design, is the powerful desire to do too much, and do it poorly. Given the endless potential and flexibility of the web, it's easy to muck up an otherwise compelling body of work with animated graphics, complicated interfaces, soundtracks, easter eggs, pop-ups, Flash intros and all other manner of puffery, when all the visitor wants is to see some images with text. Few situations better merit the guideline "Less is more" than building your first portfolio site.

2. Don't think you're a graphic designer unless you actually are.

Now, some of you reading this are, in fact, graphic designers, and it's true that you'll be judged on the cleverness and innovation in your site's graphic layout. The rest of us aren't though, except in so far as it clearly showcases the work. "But how do I set myself apart from the other sites?" you might wonder, letting that concern prompt you into an obscure, frustrating, non-linear page format with a palette of eye-searing colors. The answer, as many experienced designers will tell you, is with the quality of your work. Remember, the point of the site isn't the site, it's the content.

Begin likes to see work in what he terms "Gizmodo style": one primary image at a time, accessed either through thumbnails or a slideshow. "It's so direct, so quick...you can take in a lot of information and not feel overwhelmed."

Want some examples? Here are a few websites from Industrial Designers you've probably heard of:

Marc Newson
Ron Arad
Konstantin Grcic
Even our very own Yo

There's a little bit of cleverness and Flash in there, but for the most part they're quite similar: quiet color palettes, spare layouts, and clear photos of outstanding work. That's hard to top.

3. Don't go nuts with the branding thing.

By now nearly every creative professional is familiar with the idea that modern job-finding is an exercise in self-branding (and even if you haven't seen it somewhere else, we've written about it here). Marketing is a specialized discipline too though, just like the various branches of design, and it's also easy to over-do. So if you have a personal logo, icon, catchphrase, or whatever, use it with restraint.

It's a bit like seasoning a stew: a little spice can complement the ingredients, but too much will ruin them. If at any point you look at your portfolio site and see the branding elements before you see the work, they need toning down.

4. Don't write like a 12-year-old, or like a used car salesman.

If a visitor likes the work, they will read the copy, so make sure it reinforces the positive impression they've already got. As ridiculous as it seems to repeat it: spell-check everything. You're not seeking out a writing job, but you are trying to show intelligence, rigor and attention to detail; frequent misspellings imply the exact opposite, especially because they're so easy to avoid.

Have a friend who writes well read it over to check the grammar and flow, too. Even if it sets you back a couple of beers or a free lunch, it's worth it to avoid appearing inexperienced. This is doubly true when posting in a foreign language: get a native speaker to look your stuff over, lest a lack of fluency come across as laziness.

Remember, too, that you're not creating an advertisement, so don't write advertising copy. You want to appeal to other designers most likely, and they're as wary of slick writing as you are. So when you talk about your work, ask yourself what you'd want to know about it, and then state that as clearly, briefly, and directly as possible.

5. Don't expect it to be perfect immediately.

Note that item #1 above ends with the phrase "building your first portfolio site." That's on purpose. Websites are dynamic things, and viewers expect them to change. Moreover, if you're a working designer, you should be constantly posting new work, fine-tuning layouts, improving copy, adding links.

Maybe go back and make a short movie about an old project, or re-render an old model if you've gotten better in the meantime. The important thing is to not make your portfolio a statue on a pedestal, perfect and immutable. It won't be perfect at first, and anyway, viewers get bored with immutability. The process of updating and modifying also molds the site to your own aesthetic and personality, giving it what Begin calls "the personal touch to a website that just isn't there in a PDF portfolio...sort of like a pre-interview."

6. Don't re-invent the wheel.

The bright side of all of these warnings is that they're nothing new. Smart, talented people have been building websites for a long time now, and have figured out some elegant ways of making just the sort of site you want. The obvious (and most expensive) way to take advantage of this is to hire a professional to do your portfolio for you, which can yield some impressive results, for a price. For students and less established creatives with shallower pockets, there are plenty of cheaper alternatives.

Without recommending any particular one, I will say that simply typing "portfolio website template" into your Google bar will yield dozens of sites selling a dizzying array of pre-built templates, ready to cut and paste into your own domain. Some of them are great, some flashy, some elegant and some awful -- but nearly all of them are beyond your abilities to build from scratch unless you've been pushing Flash and CSS for a year or two. They also do most of the heavy lifting, leaving the user free to tweak colors, fonts, sizes and element placement with some basic HTML knowledge.

An even simpler alternative, suggested earlier this year in this Core77 discussion thread, is to make a portfolio out of a blog. It may sound simplistic, but there are plenty of things going in its favor: blogs are by definition extremely easy to update and modify, they're flexible enough to personalize (Wordpress a bit more so than Blogger), they don't require an FTP client, everyone knows how to navigate them, and there's an enormous ecosystem of advice, code, tutorials and free plug-ins available online for them. With umpteen million blogs in the world, chances are pretty good that any problem you encounter when building one has already been discussed, solved, and posted in 28 different places. Core's own rkuchinsky has several sites up powered by Blogger, all showcasing the sort of clarity and ease of navigation of which Begin would probably approve.

Next week: Six Things to Always Do When Building Your Site