Who needs one
Portfolios are expected of designers, writers, photographers, architects and developers, and they help almost anyone whose work leaves a visible product. A marketer can show campaigns and their numbers, an analyst a dashboard built on public data, a teacher a unit plan, and a carpenter before-and-after photographs. A resume makes claims, and a portfolio lets the reader check them.
Choosing the pieces
Select four to six. Reviewers give a portfolio a few minutes, and ten mediocre samples bury the two good ones. Put your strongest piece first and your second strongest last. Choose for the job you want next, not the one you have. If you have no paid work yet, make some real work: rebuild a local nonprofit's confusing donation form, analyze a public dataset, or write the documentation an open project lacks. Label these as self-initiated.
The case study
A finished piece on its own shows taste, while a case study shows judgment. Give each piece 200 to 400 words that cover these points.
- State the problem and who had it.
- Name the constraints, such as the deadline, the budget and the tools.
- Describe your own role precisely, using "I" for what you did and "we" for what the team did.
- Show two or three artifacts from the process, such as a sketch, a draft or a rejected version.
- Give the result with a number where one exists.
- Add one sentence on what you would do differently.
Ownership and confidentiality
Work you made as an employee generally belongs to the employer, and work for a client may be covered by a confidentiality agreement. Ask permission in writing before publishing. When the answer is no, you can change names, replace figures with percentages, rebuild the piece with dummy data, keep it on a password-protected page, or offer to walk through it in an interview. Never post proprietary code, unreleased designs or customer information. An interviewer who sees you leak a former employer's material will assume you would leak theirs.
Keeping it alive
A domain in your own name costs roughly ten to twenty dollars a year. Keep a PDF version under ten megabytes for applications that accept only uploads. Test the site on a phone, check the links every few months and update the contents twice a year.
Tip Save screenshots, drafts and results in a personal folder as each project ends, within the limits of your confidentiality obligations. Access to the files disappears on the day you leave a job.
