Job competition today is fierce, especially for designers. To differentiate yourself from the rest of the pack, you’ll need an amazing portfolio to match your awesome skills.
Why A Creative Portfolio Matters
As a designer, you need a portfolio to showcase not only your work but you as a person. If you’re a freelancer, clients may only see your work and end up judging your personality based off that. Having a portfolio that matches you will influence whether you get your next client or job.
A creative portfolio can be in any medium whether it’s digital or print, get something that caters to your target audience first and where the most leads will be. If you’re gunning for a job at an agency or office, sending a print portfolio with your resume and bio about you will help your chances but what if you don’t do print?
Going Print
Say you’re a web designer or digital only artist, traversing from the digital realm to print can be a challenge, here’s how to make your print portfolio work for you.
Include A DVD. Just because your work is digital doesn’t mean it can’t be displayed digitally. While it may require some more work and planning, burning all of your work on a DVD included in a fold out portfolio will ensure your work is displayed how it was intended to be while giving clients or employers an idea of who you are.
Include Thumbnails. The problem with bringing digital work to the print world is the resizing that happens when printing work that’s 72 PPI. Your work will either be extremely blocky and blurry or extremely small. However, you can use this to your advantage. Include small thumbnails of your work next to a description of the work.
Going Digital
While having a print portfolio in some form gives you an advantage, having a digital version to complete it will give potential clients and employers another avenue to contact you.
A digital portfolio consists of having a website with a professional design. If web design isn’t your specialty, you can always fall back on WordPress and use a portfolio theme to display your work.
If you want to display your work digitally but don’t want it confined to a website, you can always use an iPad to show images of your projects or photos.
