#Graphic designer pdf portfolio how to

Hence, if you want to start big as a freelance graphic designer, you must have a solid graphic design portfolio. You need to show potential employers that you know what you’re doing, and it’s hard to do that without samples of your best work. Potential clients want to see some examples of what they’ll get if they hire you, and only a portfolio can provide that.īut even if you’re not looking for freelance work, having a portfolio is essential for getting the kind of job that will pay your bills. Sure, you could hire them, but why would you bother? It’s the same with graphic designers. Trying to get work without one is like a carpenter showing up to your house with no tools. If you’re a freelance designer, you need to have a portfolio. Why Do You Need a Graphic Design Portfolio?

#Graphic designer pdf portfolio how to

Keep reading to learn everything about how to create a graphic design portfolio. Well, you’ve finally come to the right place. We know, by now, you’re tired of searching for the best graphic design portfolio examples on the internet. As it is the most effective and suitable way of showcasing your work to prospective clients, it is important to know all things you need to consider when making one. But there are some general issues that many of you face when trying to make your portfolio stand out in the crowd. With more and more graphic designing projects emerging, the necessity to build the best graphic design portfolio is now being felt.

Things to Avoid When Building a Graphic Design Portfolio.

How to Build a Graphic Design Portfolio.

Why Do You Need a Graphic Design Portfolio?.

Ponder how you might account for these things, speak to them, and design them into the visual experience of your portfolio piece. Why? Because your potential employer is hiring you, not your project, and documenting yourself in the project in addition to the shiny results is a much better way of answering the questions on their minds. To address these underlying questions, I have written up a list of the “nitty gritty” details that I have never seen visualized in a portfolio, but I feel could…nay…SHOULD be visually present per portfolio project. These are the types of questions that every job interview digs into, but design portfolios rarely represent. Your portfolio projects are all with a team, but how do you think as an individual? How much of the design process have you been exposed to? What skills are you really bringing to the table? If we are to dive a bit deeper into the questions of “Can you do the work?” and “How will you work with others?”, we begin to think about questions like the following: Identify how your design solution met end user’s needs (solved problem, created value, etc.) Identify how your design solution achieved business results (increased customer awareness, increased sales, changed position in market, etc.)

Real world design projects are almost always attached to these outcomes, and a designer should be able to speak to them. But even if you are fresh out of school and have no real clients, end users, or even potential clients, do the leg work and think about how your design solution might speak to these two points.

Given the variety of project types and your experience level, this is not always possible. Things begin to get more interesting when you can speak to not just the design work, but also it’s impact on the end user as well as the business outcome. Just try to fill in the points above as best you can so you can communicate accurately where you are at in your design learning process. Note: It’s ok also to NOT understand a skill from all these vantage points. You don’t have to actually list these in your portfolio, but you want to be able to use them as talking points when presenting, so it is good to have thought them through in advance. Go through your mapped skills and see if you can write up these points for each one. When you speak to a skill from both vantage points, you demonstrate your knowledge in a way that says you understand both the parts of a design process, as well as the process as a whole. How did it inform the design decision process in the project? How was the artifact generated? Was it in a program or done by hand? Why? On the “ Execution” level, you might want to talk about the following: What are the best practices you should keep in mind when executing this skill? How does it fit within the needs of a design workflow? In principle, how and why is a skill used?

For the “ Big Idea” vantage point, you want to think about how you might communicate the following: