I have four critical portfolio mistakes that you're gonna want to avoid now
these four mistakes are apart from the obvious things such as not adding in
your best work your graphic design portfolio is your key to success as a
designer so learn why you need to avoid these for portfolio mistakes
the very first mistake that you don't want to make on your graphic design
portfolio is uploading or presenting artwork with a low resolution nicey at
time and time again where a designer uploads their work to a portfolio
website yet it's blurry and of a low resolution it pretty much doesn't matter
the quality of the actual design at this point if the resolution is low then nine
times out of ten the entire project is going to be invalid one of the main and
the most crucial jobs for a designer is to make artwork actually visible to the
viewer so if you can't even achieve this in your portfolio then anybody looking
your work is going to automatically downgrade you as a competent designer so
make sure to be working in 72ppi for web-based graphics but also make sure
that before you save the artwork you're actually working on a very high pixel
size canvas so let's take a quick look at my very important your website and
you're going to notice that I try to make sure all of my projects are crisp
and that the resolution is of a high standard I really can't emphasize enough
how important it is to have your work crisp and clean but also I can't
emphasize how many times I see people posting their work over low resolution
so yeah either work with vectors or if you are working in Photoshop set up a
large canvas of a high pixel count like I mentioned before just remember to keep
things sharp crisp and also clean
the second mistake that you want to avoid on your portfolio of work is to
forget to use referrals or testimonials from previous clients now in a potential
client is viewing your portfolio of work they're going to be judging you mentally
speaking and you want to build a foundation of trust via your website
they are intending to expend their time and also their money on you as a graphic
designer so you need to reassure them as much as
possible that you are the right person for the job and one way to do this is to
have a solid proof of previous projects and happy customers now take a look at
this portfolio by pink dog designs they have a nice collection of testimonials
from previous clients that they've worked with it's all they have done is
kindly ask the client so they had a good relationship with if they can share just
a paragraph with them for their website they've ended up with an entire page of
testimonials which really doesn't look good for any potential clients and again
it does give back to that trust factor dai mentioned earlier I see so many
design portfolios that forget to do this and actually is a very powerful thing to
include now I actually need to update my own
testimonial page as well on my portfolio website because I haven't made many
projects since I last updated a and it does really work well for future clients
so if you do have some great projects from the past just go ahead and kindly
ask the client for a few words or a paragraph to go on your website the
third mistake to avoid when making a portfolio of work is not using mock-ups
now I can bet that most of you out there are not going to be able to take a
better more clean and more crisp picture of your work then if you actually use
the free mock-up mock-ups are incredibly easy to obtain they're free and they're
also super easy to use it really just saves you time and also
it looks very good on your portfolio there are links down description box
below for you to look over in terms of mock-ups I've utilized mock-ups all over
my portfolio website because as I mentioned before it saves time but also
it looks really needs I could spend ages trying to set up my
work for a photoshoot and then not even end up with imagery that looks as good
as this there are free mock-ups but they're also paid purchases too if you
want a higher quality kind of more exclusive work so yeah go ahead and
boost your graphic design portfolio with mock-ups
the last mistake in today's video that you want to avoid is forgetting to add
context in your graphic design portfolio context includes a background on the
clients of the brief and also the goals for the project you can tell a story
with a little text and some imagery of the process that you've undertaken now
you might ask yourself why do this why bother with this at all well again it
helps to solidify yourself as a more competent and official designer to any
potential clients and it also adds more layers to your portfolio of work let's
take a quick look at Peter Kay studio here and you can see that he adds in a
lot of info and background of the client as well as the project itself he does
this and in neat and a tied together style throughout the entire project page
this builds up a story to the viewer and that does actually bring them into the
content now much more it simply appears more professional which is something you
always want to try to be doing in your graphic design portfolio now looking
through this project I can see the branding and the ambience around the
brand itself which is a good technique to apply to a portfolio let's quickly
look at one last project and you'll see that he's added a sketch at the very
bottom and I suggest that you have some kind of stages of your process in your
creative workflow within your portfolio of work so finally a quick rundown of
the four mistakes to avoid today do not upload live isolation artwork under any
circumstances don't forget add testimonials and also don't neglect the
use of mock-ups and finally don't forget add context to your work there are of
course more mistakes to avoid such as adding in too little or too much work
I'm not adding in your social media accounts on your portfolio but these
four mistakes in today's video I feel a great starting point towards evaluating
your own portfolio of work and making sure you have things ready for potential
clients next week on my channel you can expect a
detailed psychology type video as I know many of you want to see that kind of
content also there's going to be a graphic design test and of course
satori graphics wouldn't be complete without an illustrator tutorial as well
the subscription-based website is in a final stage of completion and you can
expect useful in-depth courses vector downloads and one-on-one help for me -
this is all when you sign up the monthly subscription on my website and I've been
working on this for quite a long time as well but you have a great weekend
everybody and until next time design your future today peace
you