Digital Portfolios
A digital portfolio highlights your passions, talents, and diversity of skills. More than a resume, your portfolio demonstrates your skills through projects or products that you have worked on individually or as part of a collaborative team.
Why do I need a digital portfolio?
Portfolios are a great way to demonstrate the competencies you would normally just list on a resume or talk about in an interview — they allow you to show and not just tell. Your digital portfolio becomes a living and changing collection of artifacts that reflect your life experiences, values, and achievements. It can set you apart from other applicants, whether you are applying to college or for an internship or job.
You’ll want to begin by brainstorming what you want to highlight in your digital portfolio. The single best thing you can do to really get your portfolio to shine is to highlight the design process, over the final product. Liz Wells portfolio is a great example of what this might look like. In her portfolio, she includes lots of images to show the design process from early sketches and prototypes to the design through multiple iterations. As you look through her portfolio, you can see how her initial concepts unfold to create a vibrant and thought-provoking final product.
Getting Started.
Create a Wordpress account here. When choosing your domain name (the name of your site), using your own name is best – it’ll be more likely to show up in searches.
If you’d like to have your own custom domain name, use this site here to host your website for free.
Next choose your Wordpress theme. Here’s a list of the best themes for digital portfolios.
Seek Inspiration.
After you have set up your Wordpress site, take some time to get inspired by checking out some other people’s portfolios. Here’s a few we like:
This portfolio shows the individual’s process from a 3-day design sprint and strikes a great balance between explaining the process and displaying images that show his work.
A portfolio from a high school student that uses YouTube videos and Medium articles to talk about her work.
A portfolio from a Full Stack Engineer in a one-page website with strong design that's both minimalistic and organized.
A portfolio from a Software Engineer that highlights her skills and languages using easy to read icons.
This portfolio shows one way you might organize your portfolio. Here the individual starts off by introducing himself on both a professional and personal level and then links his resume and samples of projects he has worked on in the past all on the first page.
This is a portfolio from an MIT grad that interned at Apple. He has three distinct sections - Work, Resume, About.
The Details.
Remember that your portfolio should contain only your original work or work that you contributed to as part of a team.
Chose projects that demonstrate original thinking and are a reflection of yourself and how you view the world. Try to include projects that display the best of your creative accomplishments and technical skills. Quality is more important than quantity. Work completed within the last two years is usually the strongest.
Include early concept sketches, prototypes and inspiration photos along with finished renderings of your design ideas/products. It is important to show your thinking process from rough to finish.
Keep in mind that you can use different types of artifacts to showcase your work - videos, articles you have written, links to sites where your work has been featured, wireframes you developed, etc.
Once you are finished with your portfolio, send it to 2-3 people that really know you to get feedback. Often times we downplay some of our talents and these people can provide critical insight on what might be missing in our portfolio. Once it has gone through a few design reviews, get it out into the world by linking it to your LinkedIn profile.