The landing page
The first thing you should know about creating a portfolio is that you're not making it for other designers. This sounds pretty unintuitive but it's true.
Your portfolio is a marketing deliverable for recruiters.
Design hiring managers will browse through once you're past the phone screen but the primary objective of the portfolio is to get you to the screen in the first place.
You should be spending a lot of time making sure that your project visuals and portfolio website are highly polished.
1. Market research
Find 5 or 6 portfolios that inspire you.
If you need help, refer to 2. Find people who have the job you want and look at their resumes.
Start a moodboard.
Create a file in Figma / FigJam / some other blank canvas and pull in screenshots from portfolios, case studies, or designs that you think are strong.
Make a table like this.
Create columns for each portfolio.
Key elements
Name
Role & company
Value statement: strive to push the world forward, bridge people and tech
CTA: get in touch
Menu bar: Home, timeline, about, contact
Front page project layout
2 columns, limited width
Title, project type, keywords summarising project
Unique elements that you liked
They have a lot of personality
I like how the landing page goes into their personal info / background
Elements that you didn't like as much
Header is too illustrative
Repeat for their individual case study page layouts.
What do you notice is popular?
What do you notice is effective?
Notice that they aren't necessarily the same thing.
The more you look at portfolios, the more you're training your eye and living the same experience as a design recruiter (which is a great example of UX-ing your portfolio).
2. Design it in Figma first
Design your portfolio in Figma.
You should have some design basis by now, but if you're genuinely stuck for ideas I'd suggest trying to replicate one of the designs on your moodboard in Figma (it also makes for good Figma practice).
What if you took the elements you liked and combined them?
Can you maintain visual clarity?
How much cognitive load are you placing on your user?
3. Pick a robust website builder
There's pros and cons to all the website builders out there.
I'm currently hosting my portfolio on Framer, but it's pretty expensive. You can technically use a free plan, but it's much more limited than a fully-paid plan.
If you're good with front-end coding, I'd recommend looking at Webflow, but their price tag is pretty comparable to Framer.
I'd say Squarespace is probably the last resort — there's nothing inherently wrong with it but if you're looking to create something that stands out, it's a lot harder to escape the generic template look.
In any case, you should absolutely also create your portfolio in slide deck form in Figma as a backup and to prep for design interviews.
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