Posts Tagged ‘portfolio

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Tricks of the Trade: Great Portfolio Design

This week we bring you a look at the various techniques used by designers in building a respectable and creative portfolio. In Part 1 (of 2) we take a look at the use of Big, Informative Headlines and Illustrations.

Check back soon for Part 2!

Big, Informative Headlines

Many designers choose to display a large textual heading on their portfolio’s homepage. This headline often introduces the individual (if it’s a freelancer) or company, as well as summing up what they provide. Additionally many designers display a quirky or creative message in order to set themselves apart from the competition.

Typically a headline will contain:

- The designer or company’s name
- Where they are from (optional)
- Services provided (e.g.: ‘I design websites’)
- A creative or unusual message (optional)
- A welcome message

Below are 20 examples of creatively placed headline messages in portfolio designs:

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Illustrations

Designers often use bold and colorful illustrations in order to liven up their portfolios. Illustrations can range from deliberately child-like sketches, to incredibly detailed works of art, that take many pain-staking hours of labour to produce.

Here are some examples of great illustrations in portfolio designs:

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To Be Continued…

More great techniques used by portfolio designers will be looked at in part 2 of this post.

What Do You Think Makes a Great Portfolio?

I would love to know what you think makes a great portfolio design, feel free to share your own.

Leave a comment to this post with your ideas on color, form, content, or anything else that you feel helps make a portfolio visually stunning.

 Tricks of the Trade: Great Portfolio Design (Part 1)
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freelance-banner A great design article about why it’s essential for every freelance designer to setup a blog discussing the perks which come with having and running your own design blog.

There’s a few pros and cons to becoming a blogger with the pros outweighing the cons. A design blog can be essential for every freelance designer because it can help a freelancer to generate a passive income on a monthly or weekly basis.

Broaden your name across to a wider audience

A design blog is perfect for freelancers to build up their name or their company brand on another platform. The advantage of a freelancer creating a blog means they can gain more exposure through blogging which means they can attract a wider range of clients to work alongside including even international clients.audience

A good blog can be something to add to your portfolio

When clients approach designers to work on a project 90 percent of clients will ask to see the designers previous work or past design projects, which they have worked on in order to find out if the designer will be suitable to work alongside and if they have the talent and skill to complete the design project to their satisfaction.

If your an upcoming freelance designer your portfolio may be very empty because you still have not yet had the opportunity to work alongside any clients. Creating a blog would be the perfect piece of work to showcase to clients and would be a great addition to your portfolio because it will show off you skills and talent to potential clients.

Generates traffics

A blog can be a great source for sending traffic to your portfolio website allowing you the opportunity for hundreds or maybe thousands of visitors to take a look through your content within your portfolio. Large amounts of traffic from any type of website can quickly and easily be turned into revenue weather it’s through selling advertisement spots or Google adsence.

traffic

The screen shot above is monthly page views which Creative Nerds receives notice each month the growth is getting higher and higher.

Can generate extra income

A freelance designer always looked to make a passive income and a blog is a fantastic way to do so. There are several freelancers within the design community who have decided to extend their portfolio by creating a blog section, which has lead to huge amounts of success and generated extra additional income through simply creating and regularly updating their blog section with new content.

Here a collection of freelancers who have design blog sections and how much money they are estimated to turnover a month from just their blog section alone.

· Blog.spoon graphics ($3150) http://www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/blog-spoon

· Vanderaley design ($3350) http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/vanderley

Cheap to setup

I’ve got my own hosting account via mediatemple.com so all I need worry about is buying the domain name for the website which is cheap as chips which from a website like heartinternet.co.uk it will cost about £7($11 dollars) with duration of the domain name lasting for a two year. Working out as 58p month just to simply buy a name for your blog which is fantastic and worth taking of advantage of.

Final Thoughts

I personally believe setting up a blog is great whether it’s a design blog or a personal blog because it can be a great way to interact within people in the design community, it can be finically rewarding also but don’t just blog because you think this will be a great opportunity for you to make some big bucks do it because it’s something your passionate about and enjoy doing.

Do you think it’s essential for every freelance designer to setup a blog ?

We would love to hear your thoughts about the article in a short comment below that would be great.


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Title-free-portfolio-wordpress-themesI got one fresh, small project, where I needed small portfolio site for a friend. It got me thinking and lead to research what Wordpress can offer to me, with its great CMS platform. I was a little bit surprised, because I got even better results than I expected- theres was a plenty of interesting portfolio, photo gallery themes, where homepage was static, but still you can tie together static with dynamic content and add blog as well. Maybe it’s nothing new or signifunt for most of you, but I wasn’t aware there is possible to get such theme so easily, where of course my friend could manually change it’s content without touching or learning any code knowledge.

It was commercial theme I tested, but since most of people look just for free stuff, I gave it a try and searched for free Portfolio, photo gallery type themes. Maybe results aren’t too bright, but those themes are completely free for using. Don’t worry, if you are searching for more quality and wider sortiment, I will follow up with Commercial Portfolio and Photo Gallery Wordpress Theme article in next few days!

1. ViewPort

Viewport, a free Wordpress theme created by Paul Bennett is focused around a clean and simple, content based layout. The aim is to grab the user’s attention and draw them straight into the content.

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2. WordPress The Unstandard

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3. Gallery 1.2

Gallery is a beautiful, free, gallery-style Thematic child theme for WordPress, designed by Christopher Wallace especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. It is extremely flexible and can be used as a starting point for design galleries and portfolios.

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4. wpFolio – Free CMS / Portfolio Wordpress Theme

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5. Blue Bubble

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6. Creative by Nature

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7. Linquist

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8. Work-a-holic

Work-a-holic is a free minimalistic two and three column WordPress theme that focuses mainly on showcasing portfolios for artists, web designers, photographers and illustrators. Work-a-holic separates your portfolio from your blog, enabling easy navigation for clients in a clean, intuitive fashion. It also has a separate sidebar for portfolio (shows recent projects) and a separate widgetized sidebar for the blog and pages.

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9. Fotofolio Wordpress Theme

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10. Portfolio Wordpress Theme

“Portfolio Wordpress Theme” is a wordpress theme designed for web portfolios and (for now) just for web portfolios. It is coming with an Administrative Panel from where you can edit the head quote text, you can edit all theme colors, font families, font sizes and you can fill a curriculum vitae and display it into a special page.

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11. Irresistable

Use as a standard blog or use the customized homepage layout, as shown in our demo, that you can activate via our options panel

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12. Sharpfolio: Wordpress Portfolio Theme

Sharpfolio is a WordPress theme designed to enable Web Designers, Graphic Designers, Photographers, Motion Designers, Artists or any creative professional to showcase their work in a simple, clean, beautiful portfolio. Sharpfolio aims to focus primarily on your work, because after all, this is what’s most important.

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13. Portfolio Press

This is a dark-colored theme suitable for anyone who wants to create a quick portfolio or wants to showcase his work through WordPress. The theme is fully CSS/XHTML validated, WordPress 2.6+ ready and comes with easy to modify code.

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14. Desk Space

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15. Snapshot

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16. WP Coda

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17. Infinity

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18. AutoFocus

AutoFocus is a Wordpress theme specifically for photographers looking for a simple and elegant way to display their work online.

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19. FotoLog

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20. Free Photo Gallery

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21. Grace Photoblog

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22. Vivee Wordpress Theme

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23. Nishita – Free Photo Blog Wordpress Theme

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24. Fhi-Zin

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Related posts:

  1. 43 Minimal And Really Clean Free Wordpress Themes
  2. 21 Sites Where To Find Free Wordpress Themes Daily
  3. 30 Quality Sites To Easily Preview And Download Free WordPress Themes
  4. 100 Premium Like But Free, Fresh Wordpress Themes: Year 2009
  5. 70 Free and Premium WordPress Themes

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