As a creator, your portfolio is your most powerful tool to showcase your skills, style, and personality. It can help you attract clients, collaborators, and fans who resonate with your work. But how do you choose the best images to represent your creative vision and value? Here are some factors to consider when selecting images for your creator portfolio.
Your portfolio should only include your best and most recent work. Don't overload it with too many images that may dilute your impact or confuse your audience. Aim for a balance between variety and consistency, showing different types of projects, styles, and techniques, but also maintaining a clear and coherent theme, voice, and identity. Make sure your images are high-resolution, well-edited, and free of errors or distractions.
Something I always tell other aspiring creators is to not include too many photos in their media kit and portfolio. This is because sometimes these photos and images can overwhelm the reader, and it is important to be picking quality over quantity when choosing what goes in your portfolio.
The quality of images in your portfolio cannot be over emphasized. One of your guiding factors should be Imagining that you had 5 seconds to grasp the attention of anyone viewing your portfolio and let that imagination guide your image selection. Also aim for 10 to 20 images in a combination that make emphasis on your expertise.
Less is more, and the less work we have to sell to our potential clients, the better we need to sell. A well-written and detailed description, high-quality pictures, and mockups, if applicable, will certainly attract a client to choose us.
Your portfolio should reflect your niche and target audience. Think about who you want to work with or appeal to, and what kind of problems or needs you can solve or satisfy with your skills. Choose images that demonstrate your expertise, passion, and value proposition in your specific domain. For example, if you are a travel photographer, you may want to include images that capture the culture, landscape, and mood of different destinations. If you are a graphic designer, you may want to include images that showcase your branding, logo, or web design skills.
While your niche plays a pivotal role in compiling your portfolio, remember that different people will interact with it in different ways. To this end, aim to appeal to your target audience or better still your ideal client. After all, your portfolio is also a marketing too.
Social media must be coherent to the portfolio. What if an Instagram follower likes our stories and wants to add them to their business? Our style must be visible and applied everywhere.
Your portfolio should not only display your technical skills, but also your ability to tell a story and evoke an emotion. Choose images that have a clear message, purpose, or narrative behind them. Explain the context, inspiration, or goal of each project, and how you achieved it. Use captions, titles, or descriptions to add more depth and meaning to your images. Show your personality, passion, and vision through your images, and make your audience feel something when they look at them.
Consider asking yourself what you want the person you have successfully targeted to view your portfolio to feel. Humans make most of their decisions based on the emotions you are able to evoke in them. In other words, you must be meticulous and deliberate in your selection.
Captions under images in your portfolio as a creator are an amazing way to tell a story. I always recommend including under every image a short description of what the image is from- whether it be a past partnership or one of your personal images.
Your portfolio should also highlight your unique and creative voice. Choose images that showcase your originality, innovation, and experimentation. Don't be afraid to try new things, explore different genres, or challenge conventions. Show how you can bring a fresh and distinctive perspective to your niche, and how you can stand out from the crowd. Avoid copying or imitating other creators, and instead, find your own style and signature.
Showcasing the following in your portfolio will allow you to showcase your originality and innovation: - What makes you unique - Past reviews from partnerships and brands you have worked with - Why you should be hired
In my opinion, everything in the creative and cultural industry is original because no two practitioners in the industry have the same brush strokes. There are a only great similarities even in copies. Inasmuch as you are free to understudy other creators and their style, what is required however is a refreshing approach to your presentation.
It should be the first condition to work in creative fields. It not only adds value to our work but also helps our fields to get valued on the market. Low-quality work copied from stock logo websites is not an uncommon trend among some "graphic designers". Is it helpful to the concurrence? Is it helpful to yourself? Think about it.
Your portfolio should be constantly updated and improved based on feedback and analytics. Don't rely on your own judgment or preferences alone, but also seek input from others. Ask for honest and constructive feedback from your peers, mentors, clients, or fans. Use analytics tools to track how your portfolio performs, such as views, clicks, shares, or conversions. Find out what works and what doesn't, and what you can do better. Keep testing, learning, and optimizing your portfolio to make it more effective and appealing.
As rain or water is to the nurturing of plants, so is feedback to your growth as as a creative. The true test of your portfolio is by the number if feedbacks and constructive criticism you receive. So, push it out there, drive traffic to it, request that it should be shared and invite your mentors and seasoned professionals to view it. On your own path, ask questions.
I always make sure to update my portfolio as a creator every 2 weeks. This may seem like overkill but your follower numbers and analytics are constantly changing, especially if you are posting consistently across your platforms. It is important to always make sure that your engagement analytics and follower count are always up to date on your portfolio, just so it doesn't appear outdated when it is being reviewed.