The Complete Guide to Building Your Graphic Design Portfolio

Learn how to create a graphic design portfolio with style and impact in this complete guide to portfolio design.

Grace Fussell—author of creative business guide PASSIVE ACTIVE CREATIVE—shares her tips for building an impressive graphic design portfolio and offers guidance for designing effective portfolio templates.

Discover how to build a graphic design portfolio that’s sure to wow potential employers and clients, even if you’re just starting out on your graphic design journey.

Stefan Sagmeister is a well-established graphic designer in the industry, and his black and white portfolio is a showcase of colorful, eye-catching imagery arranged in a simple grid format.

How to Build a Portfolio—Without the Experience

In PASSIVE ACTIVE CREATIVE, I look at how solopreneurs can build creative businesses gradually over time, and one of my top recommendations is to have a fantastic portfolio to hand out early in your career.

Even if you’re a self-taught graphic designer or have limited employment experience, you can always assign yourself challenging design briefs to provide content for a portfolio.

For instance, do you have a passion for animals? Create a brand identity for an animal shelter or veterinary practice. Interested in the culinary arts? Create a cookbook template to demonstrate your print design skills.

The benefits of self-led project briefs are plentiful. In addition to providing material for your graphic design portfolio, they offer a chance to learn valuable skills like time management and software skills, and present an enjoyable creative exercise.

Combine these self-led projects with examples taken from your study and employment experience, and you have the bones of a really polished portfolio on your hands.

Read on for more portfolio design tips and discover portfolio inspiration to help you make a strong start on your portfolio projects.

Passive Active Creative portfolio featuring a colorful book cover with splattered paint

Why Do I Need a Graphic Design Portfolio?

Graphic design portfolios have been a design-industry standard for decades, and they continue to be the best way to showcase your skills and experience to potential employers and clients.

While digital portfolios are becoming more commonplace, it’s still wise to create a print portfolio template that you can take to interviews or drop in at agencies. In a sea of email inquiries, your beautiful print portfolio might be just the ticket to standing out in a crowded market.

Grace Fussell, PASSIVE ACTIVE CREATIVE

A portfolio is essential for graphic designers as it demonstrates the visual side of your work, compared to simply listing your past projects in a resume or CV.

License this image via New Africa.

What Should You Include in a Graphic Design Portfolio?

Graphic design portfolio templates should lead the viewer through a sequence of your most accomplished projects, demonstrating a wide range of skills throughout.

Even if you are fresh out of art school or a self-taught designer, you can build a design portfolio that comes across as comprehensive and fleshed-out by carefully considering what to include in your portfolio.

Pro tip: It’s always better to include fewer, better projects than a higher number of projects that are not the best examples of your work. Less is always more!

Lauren Hom portfolio featuring several handmade design examples — *Digital portfolio, “Hom Sweet Hom,” by Lauren Hom.*

In a graphic design portfolio, you should include:

A concise biography and introduction that includes your background, education, experience, and your particular passions and interests in the field of design. A personal detail (e.g. “I love knitting dog jumpers in my downtime!”) always adds a fun and memorable touch.
A selection of your best work, including 3-5 projects that demonstrate a range of skills, styles, and experience.
A narrative that leads the viewer through the portfolio, crafting a storytelling sequence that demonstrates how you have developed over the course of your studies or career so far.
A brief conclusion that thanks the viewer for their attention and contact details that clearly indicates how they can get in touch.

A viewer should be able to process your portfolio in five minutes or less, and some busy employers may only have time to read the first couple of pages.

Also keep in mind that if you are sending your portfolio as an email attachment, not all email providers will allow big files, so keeping your page count down to 8-15 pages is good practice.

Everything that needs to be included, as listed above, can be assimilated into a print design portfolio and/or a digital portfolio. A digital portfolio can be hosted online on your own website or on a portfolio hosting site like Behance.

Although it’s a good idea to have both a print and online portfolio, one advantage of digital portfolios is that you can incorporate animation, video content, and interactivity into your portfolio, which brings a super fun touch.

Now that you know what to include in your graphic design portfolio, you’re ready to start seeking out portfolio inspiration and begin building your own graphic design portfolio.

Pink sketchbook on a pastel background with rainbow colors and icons streaming from the pages — *License this image via New Africa.*

License this image via PHOTOCREO Michal Bednarek.

How to Build a Graphic Design Portfolio in 5 Simple Steps

In terms of how to build a graphic design portfolio, these five simple steps will help you make a start on your portfolio design with confidence:

1. Seek Out Portfolio Inspiration

Before you create your own graphic design portfolio, why not check out some inspiring examples of portfolio design?

To stand out from the crowd, graphic designers employ a wide variety of techniques in their portfolio designs, from quirky interactivity on online portfolios—such as quizzes, video bios, and clickable animations—to simply beautifully presented minimal print portfolios.

Portfolio websites like Behance and Dribbble host a huge range of portfolio inspiration, and can help you think about strategies to try on your own portfolio templates.

For portfolio website inspiration, look no further than Awwwards.com, which features and awards the very best of digital portfolio design.

Craig Black portfolio featuring marbled footballs and example packaging — *The online portfolio of Craig Black uses a simple grid layout that doesn’t detract from his distinctive liquid marbling style.*

2. Use a Portfolio Template

A portfolio template, whether created by yourself or another designer, is a good foundation for building your graphic design portfolio. A publishing program like Adobe InDesign allows you to create multi-page documents for print and digital PDFs, while websites like Squarespace allow you to customize a stylish digital portfolio template in no time.

Most graphic designers are pretty slick with Adobe InDesign, but it can be a good idea to begin with a pre-created minimal portfolio template that allows you to drop your work into the template design with ease.

You can begin with a simple free InDesign portfolio template or choose something a little more comprehensive with a paid-for portfolio template.

What should you look for in a portfolio template? A solid portfolio template should include plenty of page layout options, structure (page numbering, running headers, contents, and master pages), and stylistic details, such as elegant grid layouts for images and thoughtfully considered typography, captions, and page transitions.

You want all the basic elements in place for you to simply drop your images and text into, along with some potential for flexibility and creative page layouts.

Architecture portfolio examples featuring open sketch books containing various designs — *This Adobe InDesign portfolio template can be adapted for architecture, interior design, or graphic design portfolios.*

3. Create a Print Portfolio and a Digital Portfolio

As we’ve already touched on, there are advantages to having both a print portfolio template and an online portfolio website on hand, which allows you to present your work effectively in different contexts.

An in-person interview will require a printed portfolio and resume, but a digital portfolio allows potential employers to see your work on a more casual basis, at the click of a button.

Print portfolios for graphic design tend to be either Letter or Tabloid in size, and a landscape format can allow you to layout your imagery effectively across a wide page spread.

Clean and minimal portfolio designs are still the most effective portfolio style, allowing your work to shine. Avoid busy backgrounds, distracting novelty fonts, or excess color that may divert attention from your project images.

Digital graphic design portfolios can be constructed as interactive PDFs (which you can create in Adobe InDesign before hosting online), hosted on your own website, or hosted on portfolio sites.

The advantage of creating your own portfolio website is this allows you to really flex your creative muscles, but you will need some web-building experience or a friendly web developer to get your portfolio off the ground.

Once live, you can promote your portfolio via email, SEO, and social media.

Retro pink laptop on a pastel pink background with rainbow colors and icons streaming from the screen — *License this image via PHOTOCREO Michal Bednarek.*

4. Curate Your Images and Edit Your Text

Graphic design is a broad field, encompassing typography, layout, photography, illustration, and possibly animation and video.

For that reason, you will be looking to create a mixed media portfolio that includes a range of elements pulled together into an easy-to-digest sequence of images and text.

You will need to spend some time going through your past projects, and curating the best images from these to use in your portfolio. For each project, aim for one hero image and around five supporting images that lead the viewer through the ideation stages and result of the project.

This could include initial sketches and mood boards alongside the more fleshed out designs and product mockups, to communicate your design process to the viewer. In fact, most design agencies will be just as interested in how you conceptualized the design as they are in the final result.

As much as a graphic design portfolio is visual, you will also need to put together a bio, some brief project descriptions, captions, and a concluding statement.

If writing isn’t your strong point, don’t sweat it—simply stick to the plain facts, to help the viewer understand what they are looking at. And, of course, always spell-check!

Designer Steve Jones' printed and spiral-bound portfolio including simple imagery and project descriptions — *Designer Steve Jones‘ printed and spiral-bound portfolio includes simple imagery and project descriptions, and has a distinctively retro feel.*

5. Keep Your Portfolio Clean and Minimal

Ultimately, a successful graphic design portfolio is one that showcases your skills and past work in the best possible light. For this reason, a clean and minimal portfolio design will help your imagery really shine.

Consider a well-designed grid and plenty of negative space on your portfolio layouts as comparable to the whitewashed walls of an art gallery. In this context, all attention will be on your project images and not on clashing borders or clutter.

Lottie Nieminen portfolio with female model and product overlay — *The minimal portfolio website of Lottie Nieminen allows her striking use of photography and color to shine.*

Conclusion: Harness the Power of a Portfolio!

A graphic design portfolio is nothing new, and has been a standard in the design industry for many decades. And no wonder, given that the humble design portfolio is still the best way to make a memorable impact with clients or employers in very little time.

With these portfolio design tips in mind, you can build a portfolio with style and substance, and go ace that interview!

If you’re looking for more resume tips, portfolio ideas, or advice for starting out in the graphic design industry, make these articles your next read:

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