Portfolio Basics
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. It’s right up there with your name, role, and how to contact you in terms of essential employer information, and in many cases will be the first thing people see or look at. There’s also a lot of mixed or outdated information and easy temptations to fall prey to as you’re making one, so let’s talk about how to get the most bang for your buck out of what’s often the single most important part of your application.
Overview:
• Portfolio for Different Disciplines
• General Portfolio Tips
• Tips for Custom Portfolio Websites
Portfolios for Different Disciplines
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. It’s right up there with your name, role, and how to contact you in terms of essential employer information, and in many cases will be the first thing people see or look at. There’s also a lot of mixed or outdated information and easy temptations to fall prey to as you’re making one, so let’s talk about how to get the most bang for your buck out of what’s often the single most important part of your application.
Good news: it’s probably to put less work into it than you thought you needed to.
Unless You’re a Graphic Designer, I Don’t Want You To Make a Fancy-Pants Portfolio Website!
You. Do Not. Need. A Personal. Website. Seriously, save all that time and effort for the pieces going into the portfolio.
Maybe that idea is really making you nervous because your teacher or some forum post told you you won’t be taken seriously unless you have a personal, from-scratch portfolio website - the advice is out-of-date, at least in the USA and by the measure of every recruiter and hiring manager I’ve talked to. It was true at one point, especially when there were fewer readymade hosting options and generalists were more sought-after, but most people have long since moved on to just being concerned with the quality of your work and having the easiest possible time viewing it (both things that non-standard formats and diverting time to learning to build a website typically make harder). Buy the YourNameDotCom domain and redirect it to your GitHub or ArtStation, if it brings you peace. I give you permission. You’re free.
So with that, here are some super easy, industry-standard places to show off your work for free with zero need to create a format, reformat for mobile, etc.:
Image Galleries
Common For:
2D and Concept Art, 3D Art, UI Design
Popular Hosts:
ArtStation, Behance, SketchFab
Image galleries are often as simple as collections of static images - frequently one of more final/beauty shots plus any detail or process images you want to show off. Depending on the specifics of the piece of display, these may also include other media such as 3D model embeds like SketchFab, or videos or gifs.
Very broadly speaking, ArtStation and Behance seem to be more popular in different areas of the world - so if you’re willing to work globally, use both!
Demo Reel Videos
Common For:
Animation, VFX, Audio, Technical Art
Popular Hosts:
Youtube, Vimeo, ArtStation, Behance
Demo reels (sometimes also called sizzle reels) are short (ideally sub-3-minute) compilation videos showing off your motion- or audio-dependent work. Unless highly technical, these tend to be less focused on thorough breakdowns than image galleries for times’ sake.
If you’re using Youtube or Vimeo, I still strongly encourage you to crosspost to ArtStation or Behance. Youtube and Vimeo are both super-saturated and difficult to browse organically.
Code Repository
Common For:
Engineering, Technical Art
Popular Hosts:
GitHub
If you’re writing code, GitHub tends to be the go-to place to store, organize, and display your work.
While not built as a portfolio-first website like ArtStation, it has become a common part of an engineer’s online presence and prospective employers may search for one even if you aren’t linking to it directly. (So learn from the Tech Art intern who got flat-footed during his interview for his Amazon NH Switch-scraper titled “I just want to play Animal Crossing on a cute Switch, fuck.”)
No Standard Format :’)
Common For:
Game Design, Production, QA
Popular Hosts:
Text Editors, LinkedIn
Some game disciplines just… don’t have a standard portfolio template or even a reason to use portfolios at all. If you’re in a position where you don’t have a clear reason to build a portfolio, you’ll instead be investing that time into making an extremely kick-ass resume, cover letter, and LinkedIn.
General Portfolio Tips
(No Matter What Platform or Discipline)
These are pretty universally true, aside from the one about image sizes (but the people most dependent on their portfolios are visual artists, so they get a “universal” bullet point as a treat). The tl;dr of all of this is: get your best work in front of viewers immediately, in the easiest-to-view format possible. Zero barriers or clicks between them and the work unless absolutely necessary.
Show your best work, not all your work.
Curation is a critical skill in creating your portfolio - it shows that you can assess your work objectively, and it keeps your portfolio clean, easy, and quick to navigate.
Make it ridiculously easy to see your work.
Make your portfolio front-and-center and link directly to the page/video/gallery you want prospective employees to see. Your work should be the first thing they 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.
These days, that ideally means going for at least 720 or 1080p on all images or videos.
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 or even might require a login or membership.
Even an implied login requirement (i.e. a non-obviously skippable popup) can be dodgy here, because hiring managers are really busy and having to not only take the time to sign up for something but also probably be signing ourselves up to have to unsubscribe from a bunch of marketing e-mails sucks.
Some examples here: SyncSketch, Dropbox, Instagram, and Google Drive can all either require or implicitly require a log-in or have unreliable permissions (for example, Google ).
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).
But I really want to make a personal website!
Okay okay fine. For all that I just ragged on personal websites (and I stand by it!), there are some* advantages to them. For example, if you need an especially weird mix of media to properly demonstrate your skills (this happens to Technical Artists or Game Designers sometimes) or you really want to create an extremely tailored flow for your work (maybe you’re a particularly ambitious UI or Graphic Designer), a personal website can offer that flexibility. It’s also an easy way to create unlisted portfolio pages for job-specific applications or organize sub-portfolios if you’re pursuing multiple disciplines (in which case, see me after class, we need to have a conversation about spreading yourself too thin). And finally, it sates the yawning hunger for web development that Neopets instilled in every internet-user born between 1987 and 1991.
Again, as unintuitive as it sounds, making a personal website will not make you stand out. It is so freakin hard to scout talent through a standard search engine, it isn’t even worth trying. We will only see your personal website if we see it linked on your LinkedIn, Twitter, or a random piece of your art that we found in a Discord server or Pinterest board.
But maybe some of those other advantages are still really important to you, or the Neopets void must be sated. In that case
If you are making a website from scratch, please, I beg:
Follow all the prior guidelines about displaying your work.
Curate your work.
Make it ridiculously easy to see your work.
Display the biggest possible images/videos.
Avoid any host that requires a login or membership, or that has a lot of pop-ups or looks like it could contain malware.
Password-protect things only if truly necessary.
Avoid requiring downloads whenever possible.
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.
Don’t forget about mobile.
Make sure your website is easily-viewed on mobile as well. Some web hosts (Wix, Squarespace, etc.) automatically generate a mobile-ready version of your site, but even in those cases, review it to make sure that what they automated is actually what you want displayed.
Double-triple ensure that reviewers will have access to any desired unlisted and password-protected sections.
If you’re putting a section behind a password, clearly indicate that password on your resume, cover letter, and anywhere else in your application it can logically go. If you’re linking to an unlisted section of your website, ensure that the links in your resume, cover letter, and application form all direct there instead of to your standard website.
Again, it’s worth re-iterating: only password-protect stuff if it’s both under NDA and it’s going to meaningfully add to your portfolio. For better or worse, password-protecting something ups the expectations of many reviewers, and having subpar work behind the password is going to risk making it look like you really can’t assess the quality of your own works objectively.
Utilize 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.:))
TBD on how well this advice ages since I’m transcribing this post two days after Musk bought Twitter.
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!
