Online Presence and Portfolio Basics
Strategically building an online presence has many advantages - there are many wonderful game development communities where you can build relationships, skills, and hyper-specific meme collections, and by being on the websites where recruiters and hiring managers search for potential candidates to source, you increase the chances of someone noticing you without you having to apply to anything or send your portfolio to anyone.
When searching for potential candidates to approach for job openings, there are a relatively small number of websites that recruiters and hiring managers search. So, being on these websites is a great way to passively increase your chances of getting noticed. And aside from, y’know, actually creating the work and gaining the experience to fill these out, many of the ways to ensure that you’re easily found by people who might want to hire you are relatively low-effort.
How To Make Yourself Easy for Recruiters and Hiring Managers to Find
LinkedIn is often the go-to place for recruiters (at least USA-based ones) to look for candidates to reach out to.
Have an up-to-date profile including contact information, portfolio links, and work history and details.
You don’t need to be “engaged,” just there.
Use Portfolio Communities
Websites such as ArtStation or GitHub might seem like an easy way to get lost in the crowd, but they’re actually the most searchable way to have your work found.
It’s still totally okay to have a personal website, but search engines are so oversaturated that there’s no way for you to be found organically there.
Contact Info on EVERYTHING
Include contact info on/in everything you upload.
Put your name in the filename as well.
General Portfolio Tips
Portfolios are compilations of your best work within your discipline, and are an integral part of the application materials for many careers, especially in visual art and audio.
Your portfolio doesn’t have to be fancy! At all!
Seriously, all I actually need from a VFX application are:
Demo Reel with contact info
Resume with contact info
Boom! You're done. You didn't even need a website, strictly speaking.
Not making a website? Great! Other totally valid ways to display your work:
ArtStation (I don't care if you have a custom website or their default portfolio as long as it's easy to navigate)
In my opinion, other portfolio/compilation websites such as DeviantArt, Behance, etc. are also fair game, but I've seen some devs raise eyebrows at these. (Which is silly, as long as it's easy to view stuff and all in one place I'm happy, but it's worth knowing that unfortunately ArtStation is generally viewed as more "professional" than, say, DeviantArt. ArtStation is also, more practically, the place that many art leads and recruiters go to scour for prospective hires, so having an ArtStation increases your chances of being found without having applied as well.)
Yes, that does mean I'm okay with a well-organized Twitter thread of gifs/images, too. (But again, that probably won't be true of everyone.)
“Make it ridiculously easy to see your work” applies here too - whatever part of it you link employers to should give them the best possible view into your best work. Your reel should be immediately available, and ArtStation’s pages are great for fleshing out individual pieces with a main video and gif, image, or text breakdowns.
A direct link to a Vimeo/Youtube is also great if you're only sending a demo reel. Again, it's easy, it's straightforward, just make sure I have your contact info and resume somewhere. (Linking them in the dooblydoo is always a safe bet, on top of having your contact info in your reel.)
Make it ridiculously easy to see your work.
Make your portfolio the front page/base URL. Your work should be the first thing prospective employers see, whether you’ve linked them to it or they’re stumbling across it in a search. Videos for your main work are great - they can be much higher quality than gifs, and allow us to slow down or scrub through details if we want. Embedded gifs are great for solo loops of VFX and fleshing artistic or technical details of your process/piece.
Display the biggest possible images/videos as the embedded pieces.
I'm fine with clicking to enlarge for bonus detail (especially if I can click/swipe to the next image in fullscreen), but if your pieces either can’t be expanded, or don’t have enough resolution to see all the details, both of us are going to be sad.
Avoid any host that requires a login or membership.
Password-protect things only if truly necessary.
It’s one more hurdle for the people reviewing your work, and one where simple mistakes can completely prevent us from seeing your stuff. If you do have some really strong work that can't be made public, pleeease make sure the password is cited in your cover letter, resume, and anywhere else possible in your application. If we can't easily find the password it's very possible we just won't look, because we probably have hundreds of applications left to go through and can’t spend time guessing it.
Avoid requiring downloads whenever possible.
This is more likely to be a gotcha for designers than VFX or most other disciplines, but if you have a game or demo you want people to play through, if at all possible, have it be playable in-browser. Whether or not you can do that, include a brief playthrough video or highlight gifs on the page as well - not everyone will play even brief browser-embedded demos, and this way they’ll see the highlights of your in-game work no matter what (it may even be enough to change their mind and play the game).
“How much stuff do I need?”
Start and end strong. I don't do this in this reel! My weakest piece is actually first, because this was a Hearthstone-specific reel and I wanted to grab them immediately with the fanart. However, in general you want to start with your strongest piece first and go down from there. How strong the piece at the end is is up to you - I like to go second- or third-strongest at the end so it finishes on a good note. And, again, it's always better to cut a weak piece than make people wonder if you really think that's indicative of your skillset.
Contact info! Start, end, and ideally center. Put it unobtrusively on every piece of media you send it, so it's always readily available.
Credits! Unless it's *super obviously* not yours, credit other people whose work appears in your reel or cite the parts you did (whichever's easier).
Wait but none of those are a personal website!
It’s fine to have one, but honestly it’s a lot of extra work for relatively little payoff - most portfolio community websites have super easy-to-use (for you) and easy-to-browse (for employers) templates, will automatically make your portfolio mobile-friendly (my personal website routinely disintegrates on mobile when I change something and my host actively tries to automatically create the mobile version), obvious places for contact information, and if you really want to, many offer paid memberships that let you significantly customize your portfolio’s display (and it’ll probably still be cheaper than custom hosting).
Unless you’re a web developer, you genuinely don’t need a personal website these days. They’re sort of old, like resume objectives.
Nope!
But I want to make a personal website!
Dope!
For all that I just ragged on personal websites (and I stand by it!), there are some advantages.
For example, it’s an easy way to create unlisted portfolio pages for job-specific applications, very specifically manage the flow of how visitors view your content, and it sates the yawning hunger for web development that Neopets instilled in every internet-user born between 1987 and 1991.
The word ”some” might be carrying a lot of weight here.
But maybe some of those advantages are really important to you, or you’re just a rebel. So:
If you are making a website from scratch, please, I beg:
Make it ridiculously easy to see your work.
Make your portfolio the front page/base URL. Your work should be the first thing prospective employers see, whether you’ve linked them to it directly or someone just told them to Google “Ten Bhompson Art dot com" and forgot to include “slash portfolio.” Videos for your main work are great - they can be much higher quality than gifs, and allow us to slow down or scrub through details if we want. Embedded gifs are great for solo loops of VFX and fleshing artistic or technical details of your process/piece.
If you have portfolios for multiple disciplines, separate them into sections up top (i.e. VFX, Tech Art), pick the one you’re applying for more jobs in (or the one you love more if they’re roughly even), and make that the homepage. Don’t make your homepage a menu to multiple portfolios unless you’re so senior no one’s really looking at your portfolio anyways.
Display the biggest possible images/videos as the embedded pieces.
I'm fine with clicking to enlarge for bonus detail (especially if I can click/swipe to the next image in fullscreen), but if your pieces either can’t be expanded, or don’t have enough resolution to see all the details, both of us are going to be sad.
Skip the splash/welcome pages.
Again - just let us see your work, immediately. The homepage of my website is just VFX; if I were actively job-hunting, I would have my resume linked up in the header along with my e-mail and socials, so that people can get everything they need without ever going to another page.
If you have application-specific portfolios, just create a separate unlisted page for each of them. As an example, when I applied to Hearthstone I made a custom reel for them and simply had an unlisted /hearthstone page that I linked directly in my resume.
Having an About Me/Contact page is totally fine, it just shouldn’t be between us and your work. Also, it’s still better if we can contact you from the portfolio page too.
Still have a portfolio presence on major community platforms.
Just post to ArtStation or GitHub or whathaveyou when you post to your website. Seriously, no one is going to discover you via Google (I tried this the last time I was looking to source VFX candidates - it didn’t work), so if you ever want to be found without having to find them first, have a presence on one of the recommended portfolio hubs as well as LinkedIn. I recommend both because they’re typically frequented by different people - recruiters go to LinkedIn first and foremost, while hiring managers vary much more widely but tend to bias towards communities, where they can see the work faster.
Take Advantage of the Casualness of Online Communities and Social Media
A portfolio, pretty much by definition, should be showcasing your best work and representation of your skills, but finishing a beautiful showpiece is a very small part of the time you’ll spend making stuff. Vanishing into your cave for weeks or months until you can reemerge with a single spectacular piece is pretty lonely though, and means there are a lot less opportunities for you to establish yourself as part of your discipline’s community or build up an online presence as a potential hire.
Twitter, Discord servers, forums, or other informal, discoverable places can be a fantastic place to post your works-in-progress, art or technical experiments, things you did for fun with no intention of them being portfolio-worthy, all that kind of stuff.
If you’re posting these non-portfolio pieces, especially across different channels, it’ll create way more touchpoints for you to show up on people’s radars and build up a community around you. It also leaves a paper trail for all the work and learning you’re doing, which can be a great advantage during job hunts, as it reinforces your love of your craft, continued learning and breadth, and helps to bulk out your actual portfolio without having to put things other than your best work in the portfolio itself.
Great for casual, regular, or WIP uploads; because it's informal, you can use it to keep up a steady feed of WIPs, tiny pieces and experiments, etc. to show off your learning and improvement outside portfolio pieces.
Often a good place to meet people in your discipline/build community - one of the modern variants of the dreaded Networking. (Also, friends.:))
Discord Communities
Many game dev servers on Discord are focused on getting feedback and helping each other.
Like Twitter, often a good place to meet people in your discipline.
Feedback is one of the best ways to improve quickly, and there are often professionals in these communities as well - put your work out there even if it's scary!
Someone probably knows how to fix that weird bug of yours.
Seeing others' work helps you gauge your own skill level more objectively.
Forums/ Online Communities
Culturally these tend to be pretty similar to Discord communities, with the same emphasis on, but they're much easier to search for past posts and content in.
Threads can be more useful for showing your progress over time or a larger project compared to Discord.
May or may not contain more veteran game devs, because we're old and stuck in our ways.
You can post the same stuff in both, it's okay.:)
Many have job boards as well!