5 Things You Didn't Know About Adobe Portfolio

Adobe Portfolio is one of the most popular portfolio website-building tools for graphic designers and creatives but there are a few features that most miss out on using. Leaving their design portfolio website looking flat and just like everyone else's.

Adobe Portfolio is a great tool for building your design portfolio website, especially for those graphic designers just starting their careers. It may not be my favorite portfolio website-building tool but I truly believe it is one of the best resources to use if you already have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. I even went ahead and created a free mini-course teaching you How to Master Adobe Portfolio for your portfolio website.

In this article I will share with you the 5 Adobe Portfolio features that I think take a design portfolio website from good to great.

If you want which themes I recommend to use with Adobe Portfolio check out this article here.

If you want to see some amazing examples of graphic design portfolios that use Adobe Portfolio click here.

And if you’re still wondering if Adobe Portfolio is right for your next graphic design portfolio website, check out my guide here.

Create Text Style Guides

One of the first things I learned that helped me drastically increase my speed to launch a portfolio website was to first establish any sort of styles that I would reuse. With Adobe Portfolio you can do this only with text styles which is more than enough to help you increase your time to launch your next portfolio website.

Establishing your portfolio website’s text style guide can be done in five simple steps:

1. Simply add a text block to your page and add some copy.
2. Highlight your copy revealing an edit panel.
3. Click the left dropdown to reveal a menu.
4. Select ‘Edit Text Styles’.
5. This reveals a panel on the left that will allow you to set your text styles to easily be re-used across your portfolio website.

Now you can edit everything from your headers, subheaders, paragraphs, captions, and text links. This menu also allows to edit styles for elements such as images, videos, and photo grids. This can be very handy but I find that depending on the content, the spacing and styles for these elements can change, and would rather do that when editing that type of content.

Add Multiple Column Layouts

Incorporating multiple-column layouts on your portfolio website can add a level of dynamism and elegance to the look and feel of your portfolio website.

Adding multiple-column layouts is very simple:

1. Add a text block or image to your page (this should span the entire width of the page).
2. Hover over the left or right side of the block with your mouse to reveal a blue plus.
3. Click on the blue plus icon to reveal a menu giving you the option to add additional blocks.
4. Select any block of your liking to create a two-column layout.
5. From here you can then hover over the edges of the blocks to adjust how much width each side should take.

Using multiple columns on your pages is a great way to include descriptions next to images that may need a little bit of context to help the viewer understand your design process and thinking. I also love using this feature to add negative space to my pages and give readers a space to rest their eyes after looking at all my stellar work.

Include Youtube Videos

Adobe Portfolio allows you to upload videos that are no more than 1GB directly through the editor. However, if your video file size is larger than this, you will want to use a service like YouTube or Vimeo to host your video content and then use an embed block to get it on your portfolio website.

To add a YouTube or Vimeo video player to your Adobe Portfolio website follow these steps:

1. Add an embed block on the page (this will look like a grey rectangle).
2. Next, hover over the embed block to reveal a blue tab with an arrow on the top left side.
3. Click the arrow and select edit embed code.
4. From here you will want to grab the sharable embed code from either YouTube or Vimeo and paste it in here.
5. Once added click save, and your video content should now display on your page.

Having this feature is great for graphic designers who don’t want to sacrifice the quality of their video content. However, I find that at times this method can be a little frustrating as embed codes usually don’t allow for proper sizing of the video player. For this, I choose to change the height of the embed code, which is usually set to 100%, to 400px as this is a nice middle ground for desktop and mobile devices.

Make Unique Contact Forms

Want to capture more than just a first name and email address from visitors viewing your site? Surprisingly Adobe Portfolio gives you the ability to add a ton of different form fields to your contact forms. What is also nice is once the fields are added, you can toggle them on and off depending on what page you’re on. This can be great if you have pages that are focused on different topics.

Adding new input fields for your contact forms on Adobe Portfolio is very simple:

1. Add a contact form block to your page using the methods described above.
2. Once your contact form is added, hover over it to reveal the blue dropdown in the top left.
3. Click the dropdown and select ‘Customize’. This will open up a menu where you can add new fields as well as toggle fields on and off.
4. Once you’re satisfied click done and viola.

This is surprisingly a rather robust feature for Adobe Portfolio. In this menu you can also edit some of the contact forms styles such as spacing, including field labels, and more. 

Sync Work to Behance

The beauty of using Adobe Portfolio is that you can essentially be in 2 places at once because of Adobe’s integration with Behance. This gives young graphic designers an added level of exposure as Behance has a very large audience of creatives and opportunities to connect with open jobs.

Syncing your work from your Adobe Portfolio website to Behance is very quick:

1. Once you have added all of your work and only after! At the top of the editor panel on the side, click on ‘Integrations’.
2. There will be a tab for ‘Behance’ that has a toggle. Click the toggle.
3. After, Adobe Portfolio will begin to sync all of the content added to your Adobe Portfolio website to your Behance profile.

You can now view all of your projects added to your Behance profile saving you tons of time. You may want to review the projects once they have been added to Behance as I have found that spacing can be off at times and needs a little love.

Want to Master Adobe Portfolio?

Adobe Portfolio is a great option for graphic designers to build their first portfolio websites because it comes free with any Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. However, Adobe Portfolio can sometimes be confusing and frustrating. For this exact reason, I put together a free mini-course to walk you through all the most important features so you can create an amazing design portfolio website.

The mini-course includes 4 short video lessons that will cover creating engaging case study pages, designing your homepage, effectively using Adobe Portfolio’s SEO features, and more.

If you would like to learn more about my Free Master Adobe Portfolio for Your Portfolio Website Mini Course you can click this link here or the image below.