Common Portfolio Mistakes

Your portfolio is more often than not, somebody’s first impression of you – be it a client or a company you aspire to work with. It conveys substantial information about your work, style, experience, and ambitions; without even a single face-to-face meeting! However, while we would polish and spruce up our ideas for such meetings, portfolios tend to lay forgotten and disregarded despite their crucial importance. Outdated information, ineffective layouts, communication that doesn’t convey much – all of these factors can contribute to a subpar portfolio, and eventually a subpar first impression! Based on extensive research, we have come up with a few golden rules to help you build your portfolio to its full potential.

Take rightful credit

Design is a collaborative field, with members of a team contributing their respective talents to the larger project. However, in a portfolio, this contribution must be accurately represented, without taking undue credit for somebody else’s work or embellishing your minor role in a large project. Your claims must be truthful, in terms of work and responsibility, as an inaccurate portfolio will only make things harder in the long run.

Avoid exaggerated bios

The “About Me” section of a resume is your opportunity to communicate your interest areas, strength, talent and more. However, this self-promotion must stay within the required limit so you seem more like a unique, valuable asset to the company and not a living legend with exaggerated abilities, and over the top claims. This often backfires terribly and thus it’s smarter to just be honest about your capabilities.

Appropriate amount of confidence

Having a robust skillset is important, but selling your talents and skills with confidence is truly vital to survive in an industry this competitive. However, this confidence must be justified, must stem from your genuine skillset, and must be relevant to the knowledge and experience you have. Unfounded confidence, based on simply claiming to know things after limited exposure, is a common mistake people make.

Have a mobile and web-friendly portfolio

While laptops are ideal for viewing most work-related content, often clients viewing your portfolio may be on the move and would view the portfolio on mobile, out of convenience. Thus, having a mobile and web compatible portfolio ensures easy access, widespread communication and the possibility of success, and removes the issue of web and mobile versions being completely different.

Avoid Grammatical Errors

In today’s knowledge-oriented industry, the quality of content is crucial to your success. And thus, a single grammatical error or typo will adversely affect how your work is perceived. While mistakes are the only natural, thorough checking is necessary to prevent any errors and that also represents attention to detail.