What should be in your Graphic Design Portfolio?

Your portfolio is a complete overview of your work as a graphic designer. Whether you are completing an internship, looking for a better job, or a freelancer seeking clients, it is your graphic design portfolio which plays a vital role to stand out behind your potential employers and clients.

No matter where your career is lying, a cool graphic design portfolio can help you crack the projects and win clients for you. It showcases your work, builds confidence, tells your story, and open doors to opportunities. Here are the pro tips to create wonderful graphic design portfolio to attract clients.

1. Decide the purpose

First of all, you should have a clear purpose to create a portfolio. Focus on the effort you would like to do more and present relevant projects for a job. Lay out your skills and strengths to polish your resume so employers can decide whether you are right for their organization.

If you are seeking clients as a freelancer, present your success stories and focus on how you have helped clients to achieve their milestones. Also, include a few testimonials. If you are just building your brand, you can easily present your own works and experiments you have done before.

2. Present your best work

After all, you may want to present your best work and keep it simple to create an attractive graphic designer portfolio. Keep your best designs ahead and be sure the portfolio doesn’t exceed 20 projects. You should select 10 projects at least. Review your final selection to ensure it represents your profession well. The key is the first project you showcase in the portfolio. It would be seen by many people and referenced in client meetings or interviews.

3. Explain how versatile you are

When it comes to picking the strongest projects, you should ensure presenting most of your work. When deciding between ranges of work vs. quality, prefer quality. Keep in mind that you are as good as poor quality work. Be sure to curate only the best things you have done. Steer clear of poor work in your portfolio, even though it is for a leading brand. Even for a smaller client, outstanding work does the job well. Clients moderator your talent, not your clients. However, it is not wrong to have big brands in your portfolio. But you should prefer quality.

4. Launch a portfolio website

Now putting your work on free platforms is not enough to serve the purpose to create your portfolio, i.e. to stand out and make an impression. These free platforms can save your workload to just another link amongst several others with the same experience. So, you should emerge as someone who is professional and serious to your work. Create your own portfolio website, build your brand and control how your work will be viewed. Invest in a portfolio site and have your own domain name. It will pay off in the long run.

5. Choose the best platform

There is no lack of website builders which make it easy to create and manage your own portfolio. This way, WordPress is the best way to go. You actually don’t need programming skills. You can pick one of the hosted builders to build any business and website. Choose a platform that can help you build the right portfolio and have a lot of options in terms of videos, images, and gallery layouts.

6. Add in your personality

Tell your story in your ‘About Me’ section. This is where you can talk about what you like, your inspirations, and your personal info and how you started off. Your ‘About Me’ page should tell the visitor about what kind of person you are. Clients usually hire the one they like better when it comes to deciding between two different people with the same experience and skills. So, you need to win that choice.

7. Add a resume

Create a page that is dedicated to your resume which tells about your experience, education, clients, and projects. So, you should make it chronological with latest events which are coming ahead. Your resume should be all about your qualifications and work. So, be genuine and add the right details. Don’t add avoidable or irrelevant information. Add the links to your resume that one can download if you are looking for a job.

8. Add your contact details

So you have created an attractive portfolio, have visitors on your site and you have done everything? If you don’t have contact information, it would be difficult for your potential employers, clients, or collaborators to get in touch with you? So, make your contact info visible on your site. Every lead you get from your site might be the big one. Be sure your phone number or email address is active.

9. Create a responsive portfolio

More than half of the browsing takes place on mobile devices. So, your portfolio site should be optimized well and responsive to mobile devices to display your work well on mobile devices. Your website should be loading faster on all devices.

10. Add blog section

On a blog section on your site, you can tell what you are up to and share your experiences behind the scenes of your life as a designer. Write about the projects going on and experiments that you gain when you are free. Stand out with your personality and let others know about you.

11. Get reviews from others

Be sure to get objective feedback from the people before you launch your portfolio site. Your people will find the gaps, flaws, and chances to improve that you might miss or ignore. They can give you constructive feedback and help you recheck your site from a new perspective.

12. Keep your portfolio up-to-date

You need to review and refresh your portfolio from time to time. It is a consistent and constant process. The review must not be all about getting a new project. Be brave to delete the old work that you feel is no longer relevant. Don’t end up with an outdated portfolio. Keep updating it by adding new works. It will keep your portfolio looking fresh as always.

This article is provided by Shaumik. If you are looking for the best courses, TGC India is the best graphic design institute in India.

8 Graphic Design Tools That Will Simplify Your Life

This article is contributed by Serena Dorf. She’s is an enthusiastic content writer. She is passionate about writing, personal development, psychology, and productivity. Feel free to connect with her on Twitter.

Any occupation is made fun-filled, interesting and relatively convenient with good kits. The same goes for graphic designers who seek to maximize their work potentials and make things simpler. No graphic designer should downplay the need to keep track of new useful tools that can make the life of graphic designers easier. Here, you are about to learn amazing graphic design tools that will make your professional life easier.

1 – Photoshop

Editing photos have never been such easy prior to the advent of Photoshop. Photoshop is a design tool invented in the year 1988. In spite of this long period of existence, it still retains its place with graphic designers generally. Photoshop has interesting features that make the work interesting. The programmed options bring life to the images which make the job of the graphic designer quite exquisite.

This even works for beginner graphic designers. It has simple basic options like cropping, rotating, flipping, and straightening. It also comes with other advantages like one-touch alteration, the ability to remove every blemish, the slide controls which enhance the colors of the images, one-touch filter, RAW template support and other social media plug-ins like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Due to its versatility, Photoshop has found its way into other professions. For example, expert writers at EssayOnTime make use of Photoshop for some technical papers that require images. With this tool, you can weed out unwanted objects from the image; you can use basic features like perspective correction, clone stamp, and channel mixing. The tool works on all Windows and Mac.

2 – GIMP

Another graphics design tool you can make use of is the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). The standard tool makes it befitting for not only graphic designers but pro photographers also. The photo manipulation feature appears to be greatly improving. The flexibility it provides for designers is amazing.

The moment you start making use of GIMP it is likely to attain the level of being your major publishing device on desktop. The interface or tool is absolutely customizable and the complete screen option permits you to see and edit all at the same period. GIMP can be used on Linux, Windows and some other OS. As a tool that is useful with other graphic design software, it enjoys a viable community that supports it.

3 – Illustrator

Suppose you desire to make use of vector arts to design sketches, icons, typography, logos or some other topnotch illustrations for video or mobile, then Illustrator comes to your aid. You are capable of designing splendid artworks with thorough alignment by simply drawing pixel orientation shapes.

You can create designs faster with Illustrator. Plug-ins which help you in designing a blank web page into an excellent looking web page are available for your use on Illustrator. The price may be high though. But this downside is made up for with its useful merits – Illustrator comes with awesome advantages of Touch-type tool, the Free Transform tool, and is also useful on Windows as well as Mac.

4 – Inkscape

This is an alternative to Ai. Ai is a pro device properly used for admirers of vector art and other graphic designers who employ SVG file format. The device is great on Linux, OS, Mac, Windows, etc. It really does not matter if you were a pro or even a person who only designs vector images for a personal blog or even as a hobby.

It helps you with coloring, sketching or making photos Inkscape poses to be very easy to employ. With respect to the Ghostscript annex, the EPS files are convenient to read. The capability to openly edit the source code; the edit clones on the canvas; edit gradients; keys to move screen pixels are some of the features you would find interesting.

5 – CorelDraw

For all aspiring web designers who want the services of a graphics editor that offers infinite designs without any restrictions, CorelDraw is at your help. CorelDraw offers the most popular industry standard editors currently. It also has some good-to-go functions and such a convenience of use which no other vector editor can offer. CorelDraw greatly works properly with very large files in Corel Photo-Paint which makes it a must-have graphic design software.

6 – Adobe InDesign

Created and supported by the Adobe Corporation, InDesign is a typical business leader for laying out design templates on the desktop and mobile devices. Adobe InDesign is proper for all layout design usage like online magazines. If you design layouts like brochures, digital magazines, printed books, Adobe InDesign is the tool to opt for. CorelDraw affords every graphic designer the flexibility of drag-dropping isolated layers. It helps you resize the image with all manner of convenience.

7 – Corel PaintShop

Here’s another useful tool from the Coral team. We consider it the latest adaptation tool for editing impressive photos which even helps photo management generally. It also has some high-grade features which newbie and professionals would enjoy.

8 – ACDSEE Photo Editor

This photo editor has unique features of standard photo editing kits. You can always draw your own designs or make use of the software’s templates or formats that. It also provides better sharing modules. Its maximum zooming option of about 3200% also helps graphic designers to view and edit every detail of the design.

Conclusion

Creativity is the substance of greatness. We encourage any professional, especially graphic designers to stay creative and focus on leveraging the best tools. Because we all need the best tools in order to optimize our performance, irrespective of the profession. With good tools within reach, you will be more confident, your services will be more attractive to people and you will be able to stay on the top of your game.