We’re the perfect example, up until start of this year (2020) we had a traditional portfolio website, until we questioned why? It’s what everyone else does. Everyone’s looks the same. They’re no more informative or engaging than Behance or Instagram, so why are we conforming to what people have come to expect?

We didn’t just scrap our website in favour of these platforms, but we did rethink what a website needed to be. Hopefully now it’s an advice hub for students, designers & businesses to benefit from, which we think should bring more traffic and engagement than a standard portfolio… time will tell!

So do you need a website?

Pros

• You’ll learn lots of valuable digital skills
• It’s what is expected by many studios
• You’ll learn the basics of website design, hierarchy, formatting images for web, etc
• Having a professional website & email address will increase your chances of winning client work.

Cons

• Learning the basics of code will take time
• It takes time to keep updated/fresh
• Your projects won’t feature or be found as easily as they could on Behance, Dribble, Instagram
• Most student website are very similar in structure, and often just a copy/paste of the PDF they send us anyway.

It’s more about having an original online presence

If you’re going to avoid building a website, it means you have to smash the shit out of the other platforms available – Insta, Twitter, Behance, YouTube. You need to develop a plan to grow these – there’s no quick wins here, it comes down to consistency and good content.

When it comes to social, remember it’s an extension of you. We check the social accounts of prospective designers. By all means have a personality, but don’t put anything on there you wouldn’t want us to see :). We were once followed by a clients employee, lovely woman. However, she used her twitter to let the world know about her fantasy of being penetrated in a BMW X5 with leather seats. Couldn’t look at her in the eyes again.

If you’re going to build a website & would like a little help, try platforms like Semplice for Wordpress (which this website is built on), Squarespace or Wix. We haven’t used the latter two, but they seem simple enough.

When you do come to design your first website, start with questioning what you’re trying to achieve. As a student/graduate, your main aim should be to impress potential employees. Now, consider that studios might get a handful of these websites through every week, is yours going to be just another portfolio website? Or could you fill it full of interest & personality?

For us, we’d much rather see:

• Your passion projects
• How you think & approach a brief
• Your sketches
• Your failed experiments
• Your hobbies
• Your blog posts
• Your weird collection of Peep Show memorabilia

Whatever it is, just make it DIFFERENT.

Remember, people connect with people not portfolios.

→ How to lay out your design portfolio