When it comes to making your portfolio website, you are not just designing a digital container for your work but you are actively choosing how you want to express yourself against other people. A couple goals that your portfolio website should be aiming to hit is:
making sure that your website is tailored to your purpose/reason for why you are making a portfolio website in the first place, whether that be attracting clients or showing yourself off for any possible career opportunities
making sure that you stand out from the crowd, this becoming even more important if your portfolio will be used to apply to job applications are there could be 100s of people applying to the same position as you
the website has to encapsulate who you are, this can be seen in your work but also in the way you design the container of your work
At the core, these three are your most important goals that you should be aiming for to have a successful portfolio website. There are, of course, many other goals that you have to reach to make sure that you end up with a successful portfolio website but the underlying goals are to
stand out & express yourself.
A lot of projects that you might work on or have a backlog of, you do not get all the opportunities to show your personality and express yourself, as often you are strictly limited to your client's requirements or guidelines for school work but when you have the ability to design the container in any way that you see fit, you are able to teach others more about your process, how you work, how you like to portray yourself online (if you have any personal branding in place in relation to social media)
Self expression doesn't entirely originate from design choices but also the copywriting plays a key role in the way that you decide to portray yourself to other people online. Do you type professionally, informally, lower case letters, are you someone who's rather extroverted & loud, likes to express themselves boldly, are you someone who's more minimalistic and prefer simpler design choices?
The more you know about yourself and design preferences, the more you can incorporate your personality into your website
The amount that you know yourself will be the ceiling of how much you are able to express yourself when you make your website. If your someone who hasn't taken the time to experiment what colours, fonts, design choices that resonate with you, the less you will be able to express yourself in your portfolio website. I'm not suggesting you need to start a self-discovery journey and start travelling the world to find yourself but the longer you've worked in your creative niche, whether that be personally or for other people, the more knowledge you will have about what certain design choices and decisions, as well as colour and fonts, that really resonate with you and therefore have an easier time creating the container for all of your work
What elements do you naturally gravitate towards?
What type of portfolio's do you admire and really like?
What colours feel like "you"?
Are you someone who leans more into being professional or someone who likes to be out there and be themselves?
How much of yourself do you already express online and could that relate to your new website?
The more personal questions you ask and start thinking about, the more you will realise there are specific things that you've like the entire time but never put awareness and much thought into it. Portfolio websites can be designed and built in a couple hours to a day, but a personal portfolio that's meant to be a digital gallery full of your amazing work can take much longer to complete, and it's projects like these where we get the most enjoyment from our work.
Check out some of my portfolio template's that I've build in the past:
Portfolios being so boring with no life is what actually inspired me to make something a little bit more unique and out there. I've always loved the retro style, pixel art and a big fan of just computers overall so I've merged these micro-interests to create a Windows98 Inspired Portfolio Template, where the entire website has been designed to look like the old operating systems that we used to use back in the day. I also converted some of the most popular pages (Wikipedia & Facebook) used during the same period into containers for a portfolio & and a blog to make the website more personal and nostalgia-driven
Check out the website HERE
Buy the template HERE
More Portfolio's HERE