How it took me less than a week to do my Portfolio
A portfolio is a showcase of our previous work to communicate to the employer what we are capable of creating. The portfolio is more important for us designers than our CVs as this will determine whether you get an interview or not with the company. I have created about 5 different versions of my portfolio, which isn’t a huge amount compared to some designers and the only one I’ve enjoyed creating is my final one. I did not enjoy creating any of my portfolios so I would procrastinate on building one and keep it the same for as long as possible. This however has now changed because of my new process where I use a new tool to create my portfolio which I will talk you through.
Notion - my portfolio tool of choice
Notion. My absolute favourite tool. I use it for almost everything including planning my work, writing my blog posts, doing my daily reflections but most importantly for creating my design portfolio. I came across Notion when I used it at my previous company for documenting design work and I fell in love with it. It’s so easy to use, not just that, it feels great to use it. It doesn’t feel boring if that makes sense.
I didn’t think to use it for my portfolio until a couple of years later and the main reason for that was because I kept thinking “What are hiring managers going to think if I use this and don’t send them a glossy website?” I now know that if someone is put off a candidate who doesn’t have a glossy website, that’s not the type of person I want to work for.
I have been hiring designers for my team for over 4 years and I will never look at someone with a glossy website in higher regard. It is the work that’s important and that’s what is great about Notion - it allows the work speak for itself without getting in the way. It is almost invisible and all you see is your work.
“Good design is unobtrusive”
Dieter Rams - 10 principles of design
The mistakes I made with previous portfolios
Spending more time on the website design
The biggest mistake I made with my portfolio was trying to make it look beautiful. However this isn’t to say make your portfolio look ugly! I would just select quite an elaborate design and try and fit everything within that design. If you are creating a digital portfolio try and keep the template very simple and minimal so it is flexible for all the different type of content you will be adding in the future.
The great thing about Notion was that I didn’t have to worry about the visual design of my portfolio as the tool dictated it, and in my opinion the tool is very aesthetically pleasing. It is very simple, very functional yet looks extremely professional.
This freed up a huge amount of my time to actually work on the content of my portfolio instead of trying to take beautiful pictures and aligning them to my beautiful font.
2. Trying to make all my work look crisp and perfect
As I was no longer trying to create this slick glossy portfolio, it meant the content and pictures I was adding didn’t have to be slick or glossy. I stopped wasting time trying to put screenshots into iPhones and trying to get nice angles of my paper sketches. I would just screenshot my work from Sketch/Figma and insert it into Notion. The incredible thing about Notion is that you can embed a Sketch or Figma file straight in! So it saves you having to do any work to transfer that content across! You can also embed a prototype right into your page with a few clicks!
[picture of Moro board embdedded]
What works so well about Notion
Customisable
I love how Notion provides so many different blocks. Blocks include simple text, images, to-do lists, a blog post, Kanban boards, drop downs, the list is endless. This makes the tool so flexible, you can literally use it for anything. My layout for my portfolio is pretty simple. I use drop downs and pages and a block for my project thumbnail. However when using Notion for my own planning and work, I use the Kanban board, the to do lists etc.
You can see some examples of blocks here:
My personal favourite block for my portfolio is the toggle list. I love this because I can add lots of different sections so when a hiring manager looks at one of my case studies they can get an overview of all the stages I went through and then they can decided which one to dig in deeper to. This works really well as we know they are looking at lots of portfolios and don’t have time go through everything and this way you are show casing you can go through all the different stages of the design process by using the titles on the toggle list. This is why it is sooo important to pick informative titles, I will talk about this more in another post about creating portfolios.
Using toggles for your portfolio
Templates
Notion also includes a huge number of templates so you’re not having to start from scratch! You can also search for portfolio templates for Notion as there are loads people have created and made public to use! On the image below you can see the template categories on the left hand side. Take a look and see what parts wil suit your portfolio
Notion templates available for free
Pros
Free for personal use
Web based so whoever you send it to doesn’t need to download the app
You can use on your iPhone, iPad and desktop
Optimised for mobile
Quick and easy to make changes to projects
So easy to embed media and prototypes
No coding required
Cons
If you do want to really showcase imagery e.g for a photography portfolio then Notion may not be the best place
Can’t set a password to the site or specific pages- however you can switch off access
So overall I think we will be seeing a lot more portfolios in Notion and it will become the norm. I love how companies are starting to create their hiring information in Notion! Which should give anyone who is hesitant the go ahead! Remember when creating your portfolio you want to communicate your process and your thinking so you need a tool that allows you to do this easily. I am finding myself now adding my work to my Notion portfolio as I work on a project, every few weeks as it’s quick and easy to transfer across and I’m not having to do additional work. So when I do start looking for a new job, I don’t have the huge task of doing my entire portfolio in one go.
I hope you found this useful. Please let me know if you would like me go through my Notion portfolio and how I set it up!
