One of the best and most inspiring things about working as a graphic designer is that your designs speak for you. Unlike many other professions, you don’t need to coax your potential clients with statistics, informational brochures, or witty words. All you have to do is showcase your top creations, skills, and work experience in front of your prospective clients. But, how do you do it? Through an impressive graphic design portfolio.
Earlier, designers had to hand-deliver their gigantic portfolios to their potential employers for review (and then again collect it). Fortunately, the process has become much easier and organized today. You simply create your digital graphic design portfolio and send the interested people a link to your portfolio website or page. You need to update it often and use SEO keywords to boost the chances for viewers to stumble upon you using a simple Google search.
Who needs a Graphic Design Portfolio?
Whether you’re a junior graphic designer trying to learn the tricks of the trade, working as a freelancer, or have a lot of industry experience, having a digital portfolio is a must. It is typically the only and most important thing that a client needs to see when hiring a graphic designer. A design portfolio, similar to a resume, provides the essential contact information and case studies (if any) that you’d want to include from previous clients.
Since your graphic design portfolio bears so much importance, anything basic or regular won’t do. You need something that upholds your skills and essence as a designer – something that’ll readily demonstrate your talent and versatility and define you as a real graphic designer. It should work as your digital business card.
However, creating a comprehensive and winning portfolio is harder than you’d think — particularly when you’re in a creative field like graphic design. If you’re looking for some inspiration for your digital graphic design portfolio, you’re at the right place. Below, you’ll find some of the best examples of graphic design portfolios, specially curated for our readers. We also offer some quick tips on how to create your own design portfolio and use it to draw more clients.
27 Best Examples of Graphic Design Portfolio
- Adrien Loret
Adrien Loret is a Paris based designer who’s passionate about photography, illustration, and typography. His website features a clean, minimalist look and feel. His is an apt example of graphic design portfolio that clearly illustrates each project, focusing on white space and a regular color scheme. Glance through his awesome Illustrator Portfolios on Pixpa to gather some inspiration for your design portfolio website.
- Chris Tammar
Chris Tammar, an established graphic designer, features his versatile graphic design portfolio through a basic, intuitive website. Tammar’s logo design gives his brand a unique identity. The neat square grid on his website’s home page puts his creations center stage.
Chris Tammar’s website is the perfect instance of minimalist design, with only two links in the navigation that include his portfolio and contact details.
- Made Architects
A multi-disciplinary design firm, Made Architects, deals in architecture, interior décor, and furniture design projects. Their website’s home page acts as their online portfolio, where they proudly showcase their awards and achievements. They have a dedicated projects section, which features case studies on some projects. Their ‘About Us’ page includes their vision, team, awards, and exhibitions that reinforce their expertise and professionalism.
- Brendan Dowling
Brendan Dowling is a Creative Director who takes a rather simple approach in presenting his design portfolio. He showcases some of his best projects in the vertical menu of his digital portfolio website, which also highlights the range of clients and projects he has worked on. This way, his site visitors can effortlessly access his designs and decide if they want to work with him.
- Allison Bratnick
Bratnick is a freelance graphic and production designer based out of Boulder, Colorado. She uses a clean and dynamic grid-style design to showcase her work, which facilitates the viewers to easily scroll through her communication and marketing projects.
- Marcus Artis
Branding and Packaging Designer, Marcus Artis’s digital portfolio theme is clean and focused. He makes a lasting impression on his visitors with a strong, diverse use of his own branding. His online portfolio features a simple, full image gallery that’s easy to browse.
- Mingfei Yang
Mingfei Yang is a game designer who uses a black background to feature all of his game design artworks. His creations are typically edgy and surreal, and in his words ‘more level designs combine visual expression, architecture style, and interactivity to bring out great emotional experience.’
- Elizabeth O’meara
Elizabeth O’meara is an established graphic designer, with years of experience in designing logos, packages, websites, magazines, wedding invitations, catalogs, and more. Her comprehensive portfolio is showcased superbly in her digital portfolio website that features a horizontal scrolling gallery. The website’s theme is minimalist and uses a neutral color palette that compliments her portfolio.
- Obladee
Obladee is a UK based design studio that typically focuses on branding projects. Its clean, to-the-point digital portfolio caters to this theme by presenting its services and choicest brand design projects in a neatly organized home page. Viewers can easily click on each image to get more details on the project, including additional images.
- Kim Dero
Graphic Designer, Kim Dero’s digital design portfolio comes to focus on his clean, low key website that features huge, dynamic grids to accentuate its beautiful imagery. His extensive experience with global clients has given him a matchless skill set in food and beverage packaging design. Lots of negative space, consistent style, and a muted, simple design are some of the key elements of his portfolio website.
- Justin Maelzer
Justin Maelzer also uses a clean, dynamic grid to feature his graphic design print portfolio. He keeps his website navigation neat and simple with a focus on his design projects, all of which can be accessed easily from his website home page.
- Brandon Perez
Brandon Perez’s website homepage features the talented designer’s diverse range of projects. Here, he uses an eye-catching green and gray color palette with strong typography to build a high recall value. The website layout is smart and simple with fantastic use of small grids on the homepage.
- Kimi Lewis
Kimi Lewis is a Los Angeles-based, award-winning graphic designer, illustrator, and art director. She presently works at Noun Project as a Senior Marketing Manager.
- Rani Vestal
Vestal’s digital portfolio is a perfect example of the fact that your work is a visual of you and your personality. Don’t shy away from putting your personality on display for your portfolio as your personality transcends to your design process and work.
Vestal does this by including cheerful motion graphics in her portfolio website. The quirky motion graphic of her playfully moving back and forth along with happy text encircling the GIF is an ideal introduction to both Vestal and her designs.
- Alex Fisher
Alex Fisher is a graphic designer and illustrator whose digital portfolio is an amazing visual display of her artistic prowess. Scrolling over Fisher’s website is like entering a time capsule suggestive of a classic fairy tale. Its subtle and feminine elements are perfectly paired with a whimsical innocence reminiscent of a Disney classic. Her website theme and designs will leave you awestruck, wishing this was your own design portfolio. Fisher’s site brilliantly works as a visual testimony to her creative and artistic work. So, if you’re considering creating your digital graphic design portfolio, visit Fisher’s gorgeous website for inspiration.
- Roos Beeldt
Roos Beeldt’s online portfolio has a spunky flavor similar to the American pop art movement of the 1950s and 1960s. As a graphic designer and illustrator, Beeldt uses typography, different shapes, hover effects, and colors to highlight her creative side throughout the site’s design. This is mostly noticeable in Beeldt’s services section on her homepage. She creatively uses the hover effect and shapes to guide visitors to choose one of her services on that page. Her focus on details and unique take on visual cues in her web design are made evident by the way she has designed her website to fit her artistic style and brand identity.
- Sierra Plese
Sierra Plese is a highly-esteemed graphic designer with years of industry experience. Use of textured geographic shapes to serve as a visual design motif makes Plese’s portfolio memorable. The employment of hover effects for these textured shapes makes her portfolio more lively and playful. These special effects give perfection to an already good design.
- Andreas Gaida
Andreas Gaida, a freelance graphic designer, art director, and web designer owns a clean and modern digital portfolio that speaks for his expertise. Although his designs are softer and more muted in comparison to many other graphic design portfolios, his content design makes his portfolio worth looking at. Anyone who takes a close look at his portfolio layout and content realizes how they both come together to build a functional site without compromising on its modern appeal.
- Sylvain de la Porte
A French web and graphic designer, Sylvain has over 15 years of industry experience. His digital portfolio is exquisitely designed to combine motion graphics and scrolling effects that both entice and intrigue viewers at the same time. Every page of his portfolio is full of attractive content that’s also relevant to the viewers needs. They stand testimony to the fact that Sylvain is extremely talented, something that can’t be acquired overnight.
- Robert Irish
With more than twenty years of experience, Robert Irish narrates compelling stories through his designs and branding. His digital portfolio portrays his comprehensive work in web, mobile, brand, and logo design, everything displayed in a grid-style gallery.
- Michael Collins
After achieving his master’s degree in Films at UCLA, Collins went on to pursue a career in design and branding. He believes in asking the right questions and coupling actionable insights with candidness and imagination before launching a big project. With his skills and experience, he has designed some of the award-winning products.
Pro tip: When showcasing designs on your digital portfolio, its best to photograph them in a real setting and show vivid imagery of the product in focus. This makes your creations more realistic and relatable to the audience.
- Amelia Abromaitis
Amelia, a strategic communication professional and graphic designer, has more than 15 years of industry experience. Having studied graphic design at Moore College of Art and Design, she creates exclusive designs and custom messages for political and community campaigns.
- Jena Locastro
Based in New York, Jena has been passionate about logos, typography, and branding. Her design portfolio website is minimalistic, with lots of white space and a simple color scheme.
- Maria Maka
Maria Maka is a highly passionate designer and illustrator. Along with design and writing, she loves to explore the interplay between type and content. Her portfolio website work is neatly displayed in a grid-style gallery.
- Jim Stahn
In the words of Jim Stahn, he loves building satisfying graphic designs, and is quite passionate about reaching out to new audiences and finding inventive ways to communicate his ideas. His digital portfolio stands testimony to his work and unique design style.
- A. Darvishi
Designer and Creative Director, Darvishi has worked with numerous esteemed design firms and clients, putting his skills and knowledge in photography, graphic design, advertising, pre-press, and interior design to their best use. His online portfolio website is thoughtfully planned and put together.
- Travis McClure
Travis McClur, an Austin-based graphic designer, specializes in logo and package design, illustration, and brand identity design. While his digital portfolio may appear rather simple, his case studies are the real focus of his site.
The layout for his case studies is different from the homepage, about us, and contact pages — a deliberate design that was executed fabulously. His side-by-side layout juxtaposed by a detailed brief on his design process describes how to present your work differently than traditional page layouts that we so often see these days.
Quick Tips to Create Your Own Graphic Design Portfolio
- Have a definite purpose
- Add case studies for more credibility
- Portray real-world work, even if it’s faulty or not-so-perfect
- Talk more about target oriented designs
- Make your portfolio website easily navigable
- Be brief but sincere with your content
- Add a blog section and keep posting frequently (at least thrice a week)
- Request review from your peers
- Don’t forget to include your contact details
- Invest in a sound, professionally executed graphic design portfolio website
- Promote your digital portfolio website
Final words,
We hope that these graphic design examples and tips above gave you insights, motivation, and ideas on how to create an impressive graphic design portfolio. While it’s never possible or even feasible to copy any particular style or layout, you can always mix and match some of their special traits or characteristics to create something memorable. As an artist and creative personnel, you can always create something new out of the old. Good luck!
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Head of Design at DesignBro and is responsible for UI/UX Design, managing the global designer community, and ensuring quality levels of both designers and designs remain high.
