Every designer knows all too well about the frustrations that come with designing your portfolio. Whether it be having to recreate your projects or simply re-organizing your gallery in a way that makes sense to the user, you quickly realize how much time is spent on creating a site that showcases who you are as a designer. A UX designer’s portfolio is not only essential to succeed in this field, but also a great way to express your creativity and your brand.
The UX design world is ever changing, and it is important to look back at your first designs or even first portfolio to see how much you have grown as a designer. Although I have tried to burn the image of my first portfolio out of my head, I still think back about it from time to time to remind me how far I have come. Your portfolio is a representative of yourself, so naturally as you grow, you would want your portfolio to grow as well.
I think a majority of designers can relate when I say my first portfolio version was simple. Nothing special, just a Squarespace 7.0 template that had a basic gallery of my designs and a contact page. Originally, I built my portfolio to land a graphic design job, so there was minimal focus on UX, but as I grew as a designer and ventured more into UX, I knew that my website would need quite a facelift if it was going to keep up with my growth.
Keeping my original Squarespace portfolio template, I created a new section for UX. This quickly became a pain due to the template I was using, but I eventually figured out a way to showcase my UX projects from UCSD’s UX extension program seamlessly within my portfolio. In hindsight, I should have started from Wordpress so that I wouldn’t have had such an issue with customizing the templates; however, Squarepsace has since updated their product to allow you to fully customize your site (I swear I am not sponsored by Squarespace 7.1, just trying to get those keywords). Overall, there was no question that the first couple versions of my site did the job, I just needed to figure out how to structure my site so that it was more scalable.
As I continued in my career, I found myself constantly needing to update my site to include my most recent projects; however, the direction of my site was still unclear. I knew I wanted to focus on UX, but still felt my experience as a graphic and web designer was important in telling my story. I decided then that I would re-structure my site to include my UX, web and graphic design projects, which ultimately aided in my future business ventures. I figured that if employers were confused by this, I could simply just explain to them my background and how I began my design career. I found that in these cases they are actually impressed by the diversity in my portfolio and want to know more about my background. I realized that having a portfolio should be an extension of yourself, and you shouldn’t feel like you have to hide specific projects because it doesn’t exactly fit the stereotypical criteria for that field. Bringing us to my current day ux consultant portfolio.
As I ventured through different fields of design and updated my portfolio to reflect my experience, I saw an influx of inquiries about freelance design services in San Diego. I had occasionally freelanced here and there for family and friends, but never thought about developing these services as my own business. I eventually decided to turn these services into my side business TinyBirdCreative, Inc., after I received more interests from prospective clients. Now I had to tackle the problem of how to market my services on my current portfolio site.
Yet again, I began to re-structure my site; however, this time I switched over to Webflow. I added a link to my services housed in Calendly so visitors could go directly to booking a service. I refer prospective clients to this page which helps to answer any of their questions about my services. I also revamped the rest of the site’s UI to bring a personable aspect to my site, since now I am targeting prospective clients as well as potential employers. As I gain more experience in my field and further develop my business, I am sure I will need to restructure and redesign a few more times, but until then, I have a site that accomplishes everything I need and properly represents my personality.
