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Whether you are an aspiring or a seasoned graphic designer, it is absolutely essential to create a graphic design portfolio to showcase your skills for your potential clients. A portfolio serves as your visual resume, highlighting your masterpieces and the kind of designs you are best at. With that said, it is no good to just mindlessly display whatever design projects you have done. Well-curated projects for a graphic design portfolio can make a difference and will certainly help you attract more potential clients. To make your graphic design portfolio stand out, here are some ideas for graphics projects:
1. Business Branding Designs
Branding designs are almost included in every graphic design portfolio existing. Branding design projects are important to include in your graphic design portfolio, even if that may not be the direction that you would like to proceed as a graphic designer. This is because other than it demonstrates your understanding of branding principles, it also showcases your skills as a graphic designer especially when it comes to design thinking and your knowledge about the elements of graphic design like color, typography, and space.
Create a series of branding essentials for a specific company or brand. For example, you can design variations of the logo, business cards, or product packaging designs for a cafe. For the product packaging designs, you should create mockups for it to allow your clients to visualize it when it is printed in a specific packaging material. You may also add a section to present the typefaces, color schemes, or related icons used in the designs.
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2. Editorial Designs
Other than branding designs, editorial projects are also often included in graphic design portfolios. This is because it allows you to demonstrate your skills in layout design and content organization. You can include projects such as book covers, magazine layouts, brochures, or newspaper article layouts. With book covers, you can redesign popular book covers to highlight your design ability. Meanwhile, in designing brochures or layouts for magazines or newspapers, you can include multiple spreads to show your ability to remain consistent with your layouts across sections.
3. Posters and Flyers
It is not an exaggeration to say that posters and flyers are a staple in every graphic design portfolio. Moreover, they remain to be popular forms of promotional materials whether they may be published in a digital or printed format. You can choose to include your best posters or flyers for an event, concert, product launch, or offered services or programs from a specific company or organization. It would also be best to add mockups of your designs to help viewers visualize the look of the final product in a real-world setting.
4. Social Media Graphics
With the increasing popularity of different social media platforms, it is becoming crucial for brands to establish an online presence to gain traction and attract potential customers. That is why social media has become the key platform for marketing and branding given that almost everyone uses their digital devices every single day with some scrolling mindlessly through various social media platforms for hours. In your portfolio, include a series of social media posts, banners, ads, or headers designed for a specific brand. This could help potential clients assess your ability to create engaging visuals that can attract their target audience or customers.
5. Infographics
Including an infographics design in your portfolio can help highlight your ability to visually present complex information to make it easy for viewers or readers to digest or comprehend such concepts. You can create infographics for educational content, report on the results of a study, data statistics, marketing campaigns, or any other relevant issues. For example, you can create an infographic on how to prevent contracting a virus like COVID19 or tips on how to look after your mental health. Make sure that the project you have chosen to include in your portfolio is visually engaging and focuses on clarity.
6. Web Designs
If you are creating a digital portfolio, you can include your best web design project. As previously mentioned, there is this increasing demand for brands to establish an online presence which means that creating a web design is also becoming essential. Thus, web design projects would serve as a valuable addition to your portfolio. With this said, you should include in your portfolio a web design that is fully responsive and functional in every device. This will enable you to highlight your skills in UX and UI design.
7. Invitations
Every single day, there is no doubt that hundreds of people celebrate their birthdays, weddings, christening, or any other important life event. Including an invitation design project in your portfolio can definitely increase the chance of you attracting potential clients since a lot of people seek for designers to create invitations when it comes to these events or occasions. It would be better to showcase your best invitation design project on every occasion you could think of to create a variety in your portfolio. Moreover, in line with variety, you could also present different theme layouts of an invitation for a specific occasion.
8. Menus
Restaurants, coffee shops, cafes, or any other food places are ever-popular no matter how much time passes by. Moreover, the food industry continues to be as competitive as it will ever be. A lot of food entrepreneurs do whatever it takes to stand out by making their brand unique and in line to the interests of the people. That is why most of these food places seek professional design help to create their desired look of the brand that will resonate with the people. Hence, adding a menu design project to your portfolio can help enhance your credentials when it comes to designing branding essentials. Moreover, you should create mock-ups of these projects to make it appealing.
9. Illustrations
If you are good with creating illustrations, you can also highlight projects in line with this to showcase your artistic capabilities. For example, you can showcase your best work of an illustration for a children’s book, a redesigned album cover for a popular musical artist, a line-up of cliparts inspired from Japanese foods, custom icons of popular characters from an anime series, and a whole lot more. You can also create a mock-up for some of these works to make it more realistic or present how it would look like in its intended medium. Include in your portfolio illustration works that displays your flexibility and creativity as a graphic designer.
10. Personal or Passion Projects
While it is essential to present business- or branding-related designs, it is also good to add personal or passion projects that express your creativity without the constraints of pleasing your clients. In this section, you can showcase your best projects based on your interests or with regards to social issues you stand up for. These projects can also reflect your strengths, informing your clients in which kind of designs you are good at. Moreover, clients that have the same interests or share the same advocacy as yours will feel more comfortable to work with you as their graphic designer, knowing that your values arealigned to the spirit or personality of their brand.
Building a graphic design portfolio is a work in progress, you have to assess your projects over and over again and update it religiously to reflect your progress and growth. Keep in mind that the list that we have provided you are just some graphic project ideas that you can employ to enhance your portfolio, you don’t have to put up a project for every single one of them. There is no such thing as an ideal number of graphic design projects for a portfolio, you just have to curate and present a variety of your solid and best works to showcase your skills and creativity which will allow you to stand out within the competitive field of graphic design.
Common Questions about Projects for Graphic Design Portfolio
Here are essential elements to include: Diverse Range of Work:Showcase a variety of projects that demonstrate your versatility. Include examples from different mediums, styles, and design applications. Strong Thumbnails and Presentation:Use high-quality images and arrange them in a visually appealing layout.
Creating the logo, brand design, packaging, or other collateral to support a product launch.
You should aim to include at least three projects in your portfolio, but ideally around five to show some variety in your work.
Use clean layouts, consistent typography, and appealing visuals. Create a personal website or use platforms like Behance or Dribbble to showcase your work. Include a bio and contact information. Share your portfolio with peers or mentors for constructive feedback and make improvements based on their suggestions.
Since you have a short amount of time to grab the art director’s attention, ideally, you should include 10-12 top quality pieces that highlight your best work to make the most impact. Be selective with the work you show in your portfolio.
