rl Creative

Hello, my dear peo­ple! Today is Mon­day. The weather isn’t the best, at least here – in Esto­nia, but I’m already feel­ing how Decem­ber is com­ing

Remem­ber my last post about Free­lanc­ing? As you remem­ber, I wrote about what strate­gies you can use to get more clients, and also men­tioned about cre­at­ing your­self a port­fo­lio with some done works. Today I’m also going to talk a bit about port­fo­lios. But this time, more closely and I’ll give you some addi­tional tips on how to get more clients with your port­fo­lio

Avoid­ing Mistakes

So, let’s start. Have you laready tried my pre­vi­ous tips? I bet nobody did that Yep, it takes time, a lot of time to cre­ate a really good port­fo­lio. How it can be done? Quite eas­ily. Some peo­ple start with open­ing pho­to­shop and draw­ing some exam­ples. Some peo­ple start with brows­ing through web search­ing for exam­ples of good port­fo­lios. Nei­ther of them start from right thing. And I’ll tell you why.

I had made the same mis­takes sev­eral times, before I under­stood, what I was doing wrong. First time I began cre­at­ing a port­fo­lio lay­out in Pho­to­shop and when it was almost ready I thought, that I should check out how other port­fo­lios look like. And I looked… After that I deleted my sketch and there was a big delay in my work. Sec­ond time I thought, that I should bet­ter look at other web­sites before cre­at­ing my own port­fo­lio. So, I began brows­ing. I did that for sev­eral hours and when I fin­ished I had sooo many ideas that I didn’t know, what I really want. I wanted every­thing, some kind of awe­some crazy flash based port­fo­lio and updating-friendly php script in one pack with a lot of design ele­ments. It was eas­ier to cre­ate 10 var­i­ous port­fo­lios using dif­fer­ent designs, than to cre­ate the one I wanted. So, brows­ing through port­fo­lios was a bit wrong idea.

Good Start

So, first thing you have to do is pre­pare your­self Take a cup of cof­fee, put some music on back­ground, take a piece of paper and begin sketch­ing. Yes, sketching…on a pure white paper with and ordi­nary pen­cil, not the one you have by click­ing Shift-B sev­eral times while being in Pho­to­shop (Sorry Mac users, I don’t know your key­board short­key for Brush/Pencil). Describe some ideas for your­self. What kind of design you need? Should it be min­i­mal­is­tic or full of design ele­ments? Should it be ani­mated or sta­tic? Should it be Flash based or Word­Press blog-styled? How many cat­e­gories will you have?

It doesn’t make any sence of hav­ing many cat­e­gories, group your works before you have 4–5 cat­e­gories. Think out, how the works will be shown, think about size of thumb­nails and how the will be shown.

When this part is done, you can now open your browser and search for cool port­fo­lios to get some inspi­ra­tion. But stick to your needs. If you decided to cre­ate a flash-based port­fo­lio, then search for flash based, not a blog-based, oth­er­wise you will return to my situation.

Show­case

To search for a good port­fo­lios you just have to login (or signup, if you haven’t done this before) to some social net­work and search there, cause lots of Design Gurus post there very good links In my pre­vi­ous post about free­lanc­ing I added some exam­ples of good port­fo­lios. This time won’t be an excep­tion. Here is a list of very cre­ative portfolios.

Enila.fr

Very cool flash based port­fo­lio in two col­ors — black and almost pure magenta (with a 40% of yel­low). Very sim­ple and minimalistic.

mullerphoto.com

Awe­some JavaScript based port­fo­lio with a sim­ple func­tion­al­ity and very easy to under­stand how it works

madelikeme.com

Groovy and sim­ple grid based and Light­box pow­ered port­fo­lio. Its style and col­ors totally rep­re­sent the works

dannyblackman.com

Min­i­mal­is­tic with a white back­ground and cool one click scrolling from work to work is very attrac­tive and sim­ple. After a while you catch your­self scrolling from one work to another with­out even men­tion­ing it

edpeixoto.com

Cool dark­style and groovy port­fo­lio with awe­some design ele­ments and per­fect scrolling effect.

adncom.fr

Very cool and clean port­fo­lio made in pos­i­tive col­ors

Also visit my pre­vi­ous arti­cle about free­lanc­ing. There you’ll find more examples.

Tips about cre­at­ing portfolio

So, you need some tips about cre­at­ing a port­fo­lio? Well, here you go. What is the rea­son of cre­at­ing a port­fo­lio? Just because other design­ers have?

NO. the rea­son is that you need to get clients and you have to show them some­thing. And you don’t have to be a genius to under­stand one sim­ple thing — if client don’t like your port­fo­lio, he won’t order any­thing from you. So, you need a bit of ana­lyz­ing, who is your poten­tial client. Is it a young com­pany or quite old? How many of your poten­tial clients will under­stand the ten­dence of mod­ern design? For you some designs can be cool enough, but client may say that it’s dirt, it’s crap, it’s a piece of shit or some­thing more ter­ri­ble To avoid such things, always ask your­self: “Who is your poten­tial client?”

If you will be able to design a port­fo­lio your poten­tial clients will like, then you def­i­nitely get lots of orders from them. Yep, it’s a bit crappy, cause Clients never know what they want, but still…they are those, who pay money and if you want to get money, then you have to do what they need It’s some kind of pros­ti­tu­tion, but what can we do about it? Con­vince client that mod­ern design is cool and awe­some? Well, if the per­son is not very young, then prob­a­bly he won’t under­stand it. So, we can do totally noth­ing about it

Con­clu­sion

Orga­nize your­self and try to do every­thing step-by-step. More ana­lyz­ing will help you to do user-friendly inter­face in your port­fo­lio and it means, that more poten­tial clients will under­stand what is where. But don’t for­get, that you are a designer and even sim­ple design can con­tain awe­some and crazy design ele­ments

Cheers and be creative!

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