An analysis of common mistakes in the portfolios of web designers. Learning from our mistakes.

Last evening I was browsing a few portfolios after having a discussion with a friend who was redoing his own. I have to say it was a frustrating experience just looking through a few. In fact it was so frustrating, this post came as a result. After browsing 200 portfolios and keeping track of certain criteria I know I never want a job in human resources.

At any rate, I hope this will be useful to those of you looking to create or reevaluate your portfolio. Yes I’m an opinionated bloke, but I think you’ll see my reasoning as relatively common sense items that people just overlook.

As a forward, I’d like to reinforce that this is hardly a scientific research project, but at 200 portfolios I’d say that things are fairly indicative of a more thorough census. As always, I’m not one to link specifically to the sites that I’m giving a negative opinion on, but there are screenshots to illustrate. The goals that I judged each portfolio on, and that each portfolio should strive for are relatively simple:

• Impress the viewer within the first 10 seconds visually
• Allow the viewer to succeed in their goals: viewing your work or contacting you

At any rate, let’s begin with the most grievous:

32% had navigation problems that frustrated me while trying to achieve my goals

Quite a few people decided that their portfolio was a great place to try out the newest navigation trick they could come up with, even though it impedes the whole reason a user would visit the site: to see the work quickly, note down some contact information, and move on. The less thinking I have to do to accomplish my goal is a good thing. Unless you’re an experimental navigation designer, I wouldn’t advise it. Some of the weirdest ones I’ve seen have been a play on a rubix cube and 3D movement.

Some of the other ideas were pretty neat to play with, but they still hindered me from actually evaluating any portfolio pieces.

72% used thumbnails that forced me to view a larger image to actually view the piece at a decent size

This is probably the most often overlooked problem with portfolios, and apparently the research agreed. The criteria was relatively simple: if I couldn’t get an idea of whether what the design was by the thumbnail it got a nice checkmark. The problem with thumbnails is that it forces your portfolio design and initial impact to work harder to make me feel compelled to wade through clicking individual pieces of your work. Often I didn’t even have a clue what the thumbnail was of.

Zoomed in and cropped thumbnails seemed to be a rather large trend, and they’re a nasty bunch. Right up there with the 40 pixel square thumbnails that are more of spots of color on the page than previews of the piece of work. Put simply, if you show your work up front and don’t require action and effort on the part of the viewer, they’re more likely to look at more of your work and look a bit more in-depth on pieces that catch their interest. I can’t decide if something peaks my interest from a thumbnail.

11% decided to make their portfolio a game of peek-a-boo surprises

Even worse than thumbnails are the dreaded mystery meat squares. A surprising number of sites took this approach or used plain text links. Neither of which lets me scan any amount of work at a reasonable rate, or view pieces that I found interesting at a glance.

32% did not include a phone number
23% did not include a physical email
1% had no discernible contact information

Make it easy to get in touch, that is your goal and purpose for the portfolio. Phone numbers are very handy, but I don’t see them as completely necessary. But having an email address that someone can copy into an address book or note down is far more useful than the usual contact form. Many people are simply evaluating you, and won’t be making contact with you immediately. Not having any contact information they can take down and have available in their notes doesn’t help matters.

4% had music that automatically began playing when I viewed the site

For your own sake, don’t have music set to begin playing when a visitor arrives at your site. While browsing portfolios I currently had 28 or so open in tabs at once, and it’s hardly unlikely that someone reviewing portfolios for a job opening may be doing the same thing. Suddenly, I had some odd atmospheric music interrupting my perfectly good Jack Johnson.

Rather than reviewing portfolios the first thing I did was quickly flick through each one and try to figure out where that blasted music was coming from. To make matters worse I couldn’t find it, in fact, as I write this it’s still playing and I had to turn off my music altogether. If I had found which one it was I’d have closed it immediately, maybe coming back for another look later. Right now I just want to send that person a nasty E-mail.

Tags: portfolio, tips, web design