Are you a graphic design student or a new graphic designer entering the professional world? Have you decided to use Adobe Portfolio for your portfolio website but are unsure which theme to choose? Look no further, in this article I carefully selected 5 of my favorite themes on Adobe Portfolio that I recommend graphic designers consider using for their design portfolio website.
Adobe Portfolio Theme Criteria
Adobe portfolio offers a variety of customizable themes for you to choose from for the design of your portfolio website. While it doesn't appear that Adobe has added new portfolio themes to its gallery, I believe that the current themes can be categorized into two different design groups. The first follows a more standard layout structure of a website. This includes having a navigation that spans the width of the browser at the top with the content proceeding below it. The second group includes themes that have the navigation on the left side of the browser going from top to bottom. The content of your portfolio website is then on the right side of the browser. While this type of layout was popular around 2015-2016, I find it to be a little dated and somewhat distracting now to have the navigation take up that much space as you scroll through a website.
The themes that I have selected for this article fall into that first group that have the navigation at the top of the page. Giving your work more space to shine and allowing visitors to not be distracted. I think it's also important to note that since the themes that I've selected all fall into the same group, they share a lot of similarities between each other. Some may vary the layout of the navigation, while others come with added margin between sections, gutters of the pages and images. For the most part these themes share the same core functionality with very slight visual differences and can achieve the same results no matter which you choose.
Top 5 Adobe Portfolio Themes
1. Thomas
Thomas is my favorite Adobe portfolio theme for designers to start out with. It offers what I think is the most simple navigation design as well as a forgiving layout for gallery Pages within your Adobe Portfolio website. It uses a 4:3 aspect ratio for the thumbnails of your projects and presents them in a tiled gallery taking up most of the page.
2. Ludiwg
Ludwig is also great theme also start out within Adobe Portfolio for your portfolio website. Ludwig uses 16:9 aspect ratio for the thumbnails of your projects within gallery pages. The 16:9 aspect ratio is a very familiar format for images when it comes to graphic design as we use it in a lot of different marketing materials and presentations. Additionally, Ludwig features a three-section navigation design. On the left side of the navigation Ludwig will display any pages you have added within Adobe portfolio. In the center of the navigation, it will have your logo or the name of your portfolio website. And on the right side it will have links to any of the social profiles you have added. Something to consider with this navigation design is that if you don’t have any social links added, the right of the navigation will look empty.
3. Hegen
The Hegen Adobe portfolio theme is very similar to Ludwig. It shares the same layout design for its navigation. However instead of a 16:9 aspect ratio for the thumbnails of your projects. Hegen uses a more vertical format similar to a poster which is why I think this Adobe Portfolio theme is perfect for any designer that designs a lot of printed materials. If you design any sort of music posters, album covers, or other materials that use a vertical format then Hegen is going to be the perfect Adobe portfolio theme for your portfolio website.
4. Marta
Marta is an Adobe Portfolio theme that uses a 4:3 aspect ratio for the thumbnail images of your portfolio projects. One thing that I liked about the Marta Adobe Portfolio theme is that even though it is very similar to Hegen and Ludwig. It comes with a few options pre-selected that give you added functionality to the design of your portfolio website navigation in case you didn’t want to dig for them in the settings.
5. Mercedes
Mercedes is a portfolio theme that I thought was fun and specifically liked for anyone that does any sort of illustration focused projects. Mercedes differs from the previous Adobe portfolio themes in this list for a few reasons. First, Mercedes uses a different layout design for the navigation of your portfolio website. The navigation for Mercedes is centered within the page and has your name followed by the pages and your social links stacked on top of each other. When it comes to the thumbnail images of your projects, Mercedes uses the same 4:3 aspect ratio as Marta, except it includes the titles and any other additional information about the project below the thumbnail.
Want to Master Adobe Portfolio?
Adobe Portfolio is the most asked about portfolio website building tool on my TikTok page and for good reason. It comes free with any Adobe Creative Cloud subscription and the majority of the creative industry runs on Adobe. But I continue to see designers and creatives struggle with how to use it.
Give yourself a head start and learn the ins-and-outs of Adobe Portfolio so you can build a powerful graphic design portfolio website that works hard for you.
