- Hey everyone, welcome back to my channel,
and welcome to this new series that I'm starting.
This series, I'm calling Portfolio Review,
and quite simply, I'm going to be reviewing portfolios.
I've asked people to send them in,
send me their name, where they're from,
send the link to their portfolio,
tell me a little bit about their experience,
and what they're doing right now,
and then tell me where they wanna get to
and what they're hoping their portfolio
will help them get, whether that be a certain type
of client or a certain job in a certain industry.
I wanna review the portfolio with that in mind,
and give them some advice for achieving it,
and little improvements perhaps they could make
to the portfolio.
So, hopefully this video will be useful, not only for
the people who have sent in their portfolios for review,
but also for you watching to pick up some tips,
I suppose, that might apply to your own portfolio.
I've had a lot more submissions
than I have time to show in this video,
so this will definitely just be the start of the series.
Hopefully, if you like it anyway,
make sure you give it a thumbs up if you do,
and if you'd like to send in your portfolio for review
in a future episode, then there's instructions in a link
in the description that you can check out.
But let's go into our first portfolio for review,
which is Sarah Fisher's.
So, Sarah is from the UK, and she is a midweight designer
with three years experience.
She's currently freelancing and looking particularly
for typography work she says,
so it's stuff like typesetting of books and brochures, etc,
and she enjoys all aspects of design.
She's recently had a lot of illustration opportunities,
so that could be a new avenue to explore.
So, let's take a look at Sarah's portfolio
with that in mind.
So, all in all, Sarah has a pretty good portfolio design.
There's nice thumbnails of her work,
with a hover that shares the name of it.
And if you click in, there's nice big images of her work,
so you can see it up close.
Something that I would really like to see
from Sarah's portfolio is more about the process
of designing and what went into it,
maybe some thought about the design decisions that she made
throughout working on these projects
could be really interesting.
For example, with this logo, it looks really nice,
but I don't know the reasons behind ...
Why these elements were chosen, you know,
and why that color palette, for example.
Why that font.
So that would be really interesting
to hear about from Sarah's perspective.
Also notice that Sarah has a couple of websites in this
portfolio, along with the branding and typography work.
I would recommend, Sarah, that you have a think about
whether that's the type of work you wanna be doing more of.
With your portfolio, you really wanna make it clear
exactly what you do.
So I think that perhaps if typesetting, typography,
and illustration is what you're most interested in,
maybe you need to add that as a caption
under your name for example and make those works
the main feature of your portfolio and your site,
so that people know that that's what to expect from you.
When you add websites into the mix,
it makes you seem like you're just more of an
all-around designer, which is definitely not a bad thing,
but I think personally that it's better to be a specialist,
so, if typography and illustration is what you wanna do
more of, and you're not so keen on doing websites,
take them out of your portfolio,
and go all in on the typography and illustration.
Next up, we have Holly from Ohio.
Now, she says she's currently in her fourth year
of work experience and her third year of study,
so she's been doing work experience
alongside doing studies, which is absolutely awesome.
Right now, she's working for a university
doing a lot of their print and promotional work,
which is cool, and she says she's not quite sure
which avenue of design she wants to stick with.
She'd really like to work for an agency,
and then eventually have her own studio.
She also says she really enjoys branding and layout design.
So, that in mind, let's look at Holly's portfolio.
She's got a Behance site, rather than her own site
and her own portfolio, which is definitely not a bad thing,
especially when you're starting out.
It's, you know, having something to put your work
is better than nothing, but I personally think that having
your own site is better than having a Behance profile.
It's so easy to do these days,
with things like Squarespace as well.
You know, it's easy to get set up with custom branded sites.
You don't have the Behance branding all over it,
and all of their, you know, menu, where it's easy for people
to click away from your page.
It also shows things like these view counts here
that really aren't necessary, and, you know, relevant
to someone who's hiring you for a job.
So that's something to keep in mind, that when you can,
Holly, I would switch to having your own site,
rather than just going with the Behance portfolio.
I'll also say too that it's okay that you don't know exactly
what you wanna specialize in yet.
I know I was just saying to Sarah
that if she really wants to focus on type and illustration,
she should like go all in on that
and make it very clear in her work,
but if you're not sure what you wanna do,
then it's okay for your portfolio to still be general.
Specializing is something you definitely wanna aim for
as you get further down your career,
because you're gonna get better opportunities
and be seen as more of an expert in whatever field it is
that you choose, but to start out with,
it's totally fine, and often, actually,
encouraged for more junior positions to have
a broad range of work in your portfolio.
I really like that Holly doesn't have
too many pieces of work in her portfolio.
I think that's often a temptation when you're studying,
to just put absolutely everything you design in there,
so I like that you've been very selective,
that's really good.
I would say as a piece of advice to take the student work
off the start of all of these pieces that you have in here,
because rightly or wrongly, sometimes when you're applying
for a job, people will look down on student work
and think that, oh, it doesn't matter
because it was just done for a university project.
I personally don't believe in that.
I think work is work, and you've worked on it,
you've got a process behind it, so you should show it,
and it's valid to have in your portfolio.
I like that within these projects, you've put
a little bit about it, and shown a bit of the detail,
like the color palette and the typefaces, etc,
but, like I was just talking about with Sarah,
talking about your process is gonna be really good as well,
so if you can do that, then that's great.
So yeah, take student work off of those titles.
I don't know if within Behance you can have like
a description at the side of the project,
or I think I've seen some people have like an image
that's a description as part of this series we see here,
so maybe you could do that, and explain a little bit more
about the project and your reasonings behind it,
and you can just mention in there
that it was done for a university brief.
Okay, next up, we have Merle's portfolio.
So, Merle is a designer from North Carolina.
He's enjoying what he's doing right now,
but doesn't wanna stay in it forever.
He's liking logo design specifically,
and that's what he's wanting to get more work in,
but more generally, he likes anything to do with
visual identity design, and prefers working one-on-one
with clients rather than freelancing for an agency,
which I totally understand.
So, I really wanted to talk about Merle's portfolio,
because I think it's a really great example
of how portfolios can be about more than just your work.
So, at the top of it here, Merle's got his logo
and branding design, and then he's got a great quote
from Paul Rand that automatically puts you
in the state of mind of what a logo really is,
and it shows some deeper understanding there,
which I really like.
It's got some testimonials, which is great,
and also some blog posts and an FAQ.
Initially, looking at this site feels really professional,
and it feels like you've really thought it through
and that you're a professional freelancer
and you're there to be hired.
Merle has a really great info page as well,
which I really liked, which clearly details exactly what
it is that he does, and also details his design process,
which is really cool for clients to read
before they come onboard.
One piece of advice first up, I would say,
is to move your hire me button further up the top,
'cause you don't see it until you get right down the bottom,
and I don't know, having it higher up
might encourage more clicks on it.
Maybe you could even rename this info page in general
to be the hire me page.
Merle also has a blog, which I really like seeing
in a portfolio site.
I think that's great, because that means this gives you
a space to write about your chosen field
and topic of interest of whatever,
and a chance for you to further prove that
you're an expert on it and that you're the person to hire.
Going into Merle's work, I really like that he shows
a lot of the process behind the creation of these pieces,
so the mood board, typography, and, you know,
just a little bit of explanation
of how he came to that final solution.
I really like that the logos are shown in situations,
so they're on a product or whatever
for their intended purpose.
That's really good.
Gives context.
But what I'd really like to see
is that when you click into one of these sections,
you see the logo perhaps flat
or, you know, on flat color, or just in black and white,
up the very top, so that you can just initially
see the logo in more detail from the initial picture.
Before seeing all the mood board and things like that,
because I think that means you're presenting the concept,
and then explaining the reasoning behind it.
In general, this portfolio is really well laid out,
and there's a lot of great information in there.
Keep writing on your blog, Merle, because I think
that that will definitely help you get to that next stage
of your career, because you're just further proving
that you're an expert in your subject matter,
and keep on being selective about
what work you include as well.
Cool, so there we go.
There is the first episode in this Portfolio Review series.
Let me know what you thought about it.
I'm definitely open for feedback, constructive criticism,
or whatever, whatever you'd like to see
from these videos going forward,
because I do wanna make it a series,
so let me know down below in the comments
what you thought, and remember to check out
the link in the description if you wanna submit yours
for a future episode.
Thank you for watching!
Give it a thumbs up if you enjoyed it,
and I will see you next time.
Bye!