The second edition of Portfolio Squeeze is here! Here are all the amazing design portfolio websites from January and a freshly squeezed review of a portfolio website I found that I think does a great job highlighting the most important parts of projects that clients and hiring managers love to see.
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The Portfolio Squeeze is a monthly newsletter focused on helping you improve your design portfolio website. The Portfolio Squeeze includes examples of top-notch design portfolio websites from around the world, video reviews, and deep dives into the art of the portfolio.
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If you would like The Portfolio Squeeze sent directly to your inbox every month, you can subscribe here.
Extra Juicy
How To Highlight Your Design Projects
Alex Lafaki
Alex is a design lead with over thirteen years of experience based out of the UK and I think you could take away a few things from his project case studies.
Before we jump into his project pages, let me give you a quick overview of the rest of his design portfolio website. Alex has three pages outside of his case study pages. Home, about, and contact.
Homepage: Alex's homepage is simple and focused. At the top of the page he has his header with the headline "Hey I transform your ideas into great experiences". Short, sweet, and straight to the point of being a creative that makes sense of all visual ideas clients or companies might have. Directly below his headline he has his work section. I'll go out on a limb and say that the work featured in this section is curated and not just everything under the sun that Alex has completed. The one thing I really like about Alex's work section is that he has put some thought into making the thumbnails have different interactions/animations. For example one thumbnail might have an animated logo on hover while others will have at the very least a hover animation of the selected image. Definitely a nice touch. At the bottom of his homepage, and all pages for that matter, is a simple footer with his name and social links.
About page: Alex's about page is nothing crazy and that is totally ok. He has 13 years of experience doing a lot of the talking for him, so having a page like this, in my opinion, is kind of a nice to have. However it is always appreciated to provide a page like this so visitors can learn more about you, the type of work you do, and any other small details that help paint a better picture of you as a creative.
**Contact page: **Yep you guessed it, a link to contact Alex. Fin.
Now let's talk about Alex's case study pages. This is the area I see a lot of designers and creatives struggling with. The HOW and WHAT to highlight from a completed design project. Alex's case study pages are straight to point. He includes a ton of great images to help illustrate the variety of different problems he has helped solve and the solutions he has built to do so.
The other great thing about Alex's case study pages is that he has also included a bunch of descriptions between his images to help provide context about what it is we are looking at but also to explain his process. Alex goes above and beyond at the end of most of his project case studies by providing a section that acts as a TLDR. In this section he summarizes exactly he and the team has done by providing very clear details about the deliverables and results of his work. From the projects that I looked over, Alex has been very intentional about providing some sort of data point that speaks to an increase in business, performance, delivery, etc.
Alex's design portfolio website is a great example of how to distill all of the important pieces from your experience and previous projects into a concise and legible summary. Resulting in visitors not only enjoying but learning about you as a designer and how much of an impact you could make working together.
Score: 8.3/10
Built with: Framer
Squeezed This Month
A Super Clear + Honest Approach to a Design Portfolio Website
Rose Kuan
Score: 8.7/10
Built with: Squarespace
Everyone Should Have a Playground
Alessandro Giammaria
Score: 6.3/10
Built with: Wordpress
Paint the Portfolio Red!
María Vargas
Score: 9.7/10
Built with: Wordpress
Your Design Portfolio Website As An Archive
Kevin Hoegger
Score: 8.9/10
Built with: Custom Coded
Review Rewind
Stand Out to Your Dream Creative Job with a Strategic Portfolio Website
Portfolio Review #125
- Positioning your portfolio to demonstrate your experience level.
- Telling the story behind your projects through detailed descriptions.
- Curating your best 3-4 projects to align with your career goals.
The Squeeze
What Are The Best Portfolio Website Builders?
Every year is a new opportunity to reinvent yourself, and for a graphic designer, that will most likely involve undertaking the monolith project of redesigning your design portfolio website. Now over the years I have found that it always helps to start with the design and laying out your pages in something like Figma before getting into the weeds about what tool or platform to use. If you're already past that and ready to start building, then here is a list of tools/builders that you should consider using. I am planning to do a full article on this going deep on each so for now I'll go ahead and leave a few thoughts with each one.
This list is in a loose order. A combination of tools I've personally used, seen other designers use during my portfolio reviews, and some that I have heard or just learned about that I will want to review in the future.
- Webflow - Love it, use it everyday for my clients. However, definitely can have a steep learning curve especially when it comes to naming classes and being mindful of how you reuse them.
- Framer - Love love love. Currently my favorite
- Squarespace - I have heard some mixed reviews since they have updated their interface.
- Adobe Portfolio - I have a free course on AP and to be fair it gets the job done.
- Cargo - This has been around forever and every once in a while I see a really awesome site using this.
- ReadyMag - Another great tool. They have done a great job putting a lot of power into your hands with their prebuilt elements.
- Carrrd - I really like this tool, I recommend a lot as well for uses outside of a portfolio website.
- Wordpress - The dinosaur of the website building world. It's fine, I just hate the idea of frankensteining plugins and extras on top of a platform to make the thing do what you want.
- Wix - I am not a big fan of Wix and don't think I ever will be. The portfolios I have seen on it make me woozy.
- Showit - Showit is a wizzywig tool that is built on top of Wordpress. Again not my favorite but I know people who use it and like it so I won't say much yet.
- Carbonmade - I like how you can apply different layouts really quick in their interface but personally I haven't used it.
- Notion - I think this is one of the cooler DIY options out there. You can make a few pages pretty quickly and publish it to the web and interact with it just like a website.
- Google Docs - Another indy DIY option that I have seen designers employ over the years. Not the prettiest but gets the job done.
- Dunked - I have seen a few of these come across my desk and their fine.
- Nicepage - Really unsure about this tool, I have only seen 1 designer use this.
- Pixpa - Looks very focused around photography and imagery. Looks fine though.
- Zyro - Never used it, looks interesting but I'm not dying to try it.
- Webflium - Definitely never heard of this one.
- Duda - Looks cool, never used it.
- Fabrik - Again, looks cool, never used it.
- Strikingly - Looks like they went for the canva look.
- Jimdo - A website builder, not specifically a portfolio builder.
I will be working over the next couple of weeks to dig deeper on all of these portfolio builders and put together a more in-depth article.
If I missed a platform or tool that you know about, feel free to send it to me with a reply here.
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