Getting your work online

This post is part of a larger series of posts aimed at helping designers present themselves online. Learn more about “Crafting Your UX Portfolio” here.

One of the most common pitfalls people find themselves in is obsessing over the prettiness of their portfolio: how’s it going to look? Where am I going to put it? How am I going to share it with people?

But this should be the last thing on your mind until you’ve written out your case studies.

Your primary goal is to tell your story. It’s to write. Mike Monteiro says it best in his short essay, “Why Is A Designer Using Medium?!?”:

As a designer, it’s my job to make sure my work reaches its intended audience. And right now, the best chance of doing that is on Medium. […] As a designer, you use the best tools at hand to achieve your goal.

Got it? Good. Now let’s assume you’ve nailed the basics: your short bio is written, you’ve started writing case studies for 2 or 3 of the projects you want to showcase, and you’re itching to get a draft online so you can start iterating. Where do you start?

As usual, you’ve got a huge list of things to pick from in getting your portfolio out there, all with varying skill levels and flexibility. Let’s go through a few questions to sort it all out:

Do you build it yourself from scratch with HTML/CSS?

• Pros: You can custom tailor it, making it look & feel exactly how you want it to. You control the entire experience.
• Cons: You have to build it and possibly host it yourself: those alone could be a pain in the butt depending on how proficient you are with that whole process.

If you can’t code well (yet?), then you shouldn’t pick this path. Even if you can code, you might find that skipping the building process saves you a lot of time and lets you focus on the most important part: presenting yourself and your process in the case studies.

Sidenote from Paul: I start almost every design project in a text editor, as writing, even though I’m a seasoned developer.

If you’re comfortable with code, and you’ve spent a good chunk of time on your writing, then sure, go ahead and craft your experience. But don’t spend too much time here. Cap yourself to a weekend. It’s incredibly easy to let time slip by.

Do you host it on a CMS like Wordpress or Squarespace?

• Pros: No messing with hosting or coding. Just pick a pre-built template and paste your content into it. You get your own URL which looks professional. You own your content.
• Cons: Most portfolio templates out there are still very visual focused. There is no guarantee that the template you pick will have the exact feel or will fit your portfolio 100%.

We recommend starting with an editor like Squarespace. They have beautiful templates with an easy-to-use editor that let’s you focus on getting your writing & screenshots up on the web. If you want to go the Wordpress route, we highly recommend the Semplice portfolio platform — it’s one of the easiest templates to work with, that’s beautiful out of the box, but allows all manner of great creative tinkering with minimal hacking. Best part: it’s by designers for designers.

Do you use an online designer platform like Behance or Dribbble?

• Pros: These sites already have an audience and a social networking mechanism, making it easier to be “discovered”. Posting screenshots of your work is simple. Just having a presence on these sites is seen as a positive checkmark in the eyes of some.
• Cons: Feels less like a professional portfolio and more like an art gallery of your projects, with an emphasis on the visual “shininess” of your work (this could be a nice pro if your focus is visual design.) People wanting to look at your work could easily get distracted by other designer’s works. The most unfortunate part: people are easily anchored to how many “likes” or “hearts” your work gets (e.g. I see one of your pieces has “only” 5 likes, while other designers can nab hundreds) which may affect their perception of your work.

Don’t rely on these sites to act as your portfolio, but if possible, having a curated presence on these sites can help you be seen as more established. Curation is a keyword here — stick your strongest pieces.

Start low-tech and work your way up

What’s all this mean for you? It means you need to get your work out in the easiest way possible. Your goal is to get a job, and you get a job first-and-foremost by sharing your design process.

Our suggestion is to start low-tech and work your way up. Even if you’re a proficient coder, we’d recommend going the low-tech route (begin at step 1) to start fleshing your content out, and then you can jump to the later stages.

1. Start with Medium. One article should be your “landing page” that follows the 3-step list we mentioned earlier in “You need a portfolio”. The rest of the articles should be your case studies. If you want, publish these as unlisted so they stay private.
2. Use Squarespace (or similar web builder, e.g. Tumblr, Virb) and pick a template. Move your content over.
3. Use the Semplice Labs portfolio platform for Wordpress and customize it to your heart’s content.
4. Design + build your own page. As long as you’re focused on the content, do what you want. (Try not to go overboard with custom layouts, crazy animations, experimental styles, etc. It’s still your portfolio, and most people expect a certain format.)

Next up → “Getting feedback”