Welcome to the very first edition of the The Portfolio Squeeze in 2024! I am super excited to get this newsletter off the ground finally after much patience and hard work. After launching Creative Juice I noticed that the Portfolio of the Week section was growing in popularity so this newsletter is focused solely around design portfolio websites and how you can improve yours as we analyze the best. If you have any specific questions about anything from this newsletter please do not hesitate to send me a reply at this email.
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The Portfolio Squeeze is a monthly newsletter focused on helping you improve your design portfolio website. The Portfolio Squeeze includes examples of top-notch design portfolio websites from around the world, video reviews, and deep dives into the art of the portfolio.
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If you would like The Portfolio Squeeze sent directly to your inbox every month, you can subscribe here.
Extra Juicy
A Design Portfolio With Buttery Smooth Animations
Rishad Amarkhel
Do not under estimate the power of a simple 'on view scroll animation'. Rishad is an art director and designer out of California and has masterfully employed the 'on view scroll animation' throughout his portfolio website and really impressed me. With over 9 years of experience, Rishad has a very simple and effective portfolio website. He essentially has 2 main pages. The first being his homepage which houses his selected projects, a 'playground/blog', a quick about me, and testimonials. And the second being his individual pages for his projects.
Let's talk homepage first. I've said it before and I'll continue to say it as long as you subscribe, but there is nothing wrong with keeping your portfolio website simple. We are all probably familiar with the stat about our shortening attention span. With that in mind, why wouldn't you want to make as big a splash as possible with the first page of your portfolio website? Including projects, experiments, testimonials, and background info all on your homepage is a great way to tell your story in a short amount of time to anyone that visits your design portfolio website.
At the top, Rishad has done a great job with his header including what he does and who he does it for. Straight to the point. I love it.
Next, we dive into his selected work section where Rishad has included beautiful, high-quality thumbnails that have a little interaction as you scroll and over them. I think it's worth mentioning that not all the thumbnails will take you to an individual project page. Some take you to a live site. I like this but the only thing I wish I was here was something visual to give me a heads up that I would be taken off site. Not a big deal at all.
After, we have a nice little section titled 'playground' which is where Rishad shares all his little experiments and exercises that might not have enough meat to require a full case-study.
Below, is a nicely organized section that gives insight to Rishad's background and visitors the ability to contact him if they would like to work together.
Finally, we have a testimonials section. If you haven't already incorporated this into your process whether you work as a freelancer or full-time. Testimonials will continue to grow in popularity and impact who works with who.
Rishad is using Framer for this portfolio website design and I love how as you scroll through his portfolio, element appear on view. This is something that is made really easy within Framer and it only takes a few minutes to adjust to get the right amount of ease you're looking for.
Rishad's design portfolio website keeps things simple, letting the content speak for itself.
What do you think of Rishad's portfolio website? What would you score it?
Score: 8.3/10
Built with: Framer
Squeezed This Month
He's A Smooth Animator
Chris Kalaftis
Score: 9.6/10
Built with: Webflow
The Proof Is In The Pudding (or Portfolio)
Félix Péault
Score: 9.1/10
Built with: Custom Coded
The Only Sidebar I'm OK With
Daniela Muntyan
Score: 8.8/10
Built with: Framer
The Power of Social Proof
Kurt Winter
Score: 7.2/10
Built with: Webflow
Review Rewind
How to Inject Your Personality Into Your Design Portfolio Website
Portfolio Review #122
- How to add more personality through color, fonts, etc.
- What to include in a portfolio website header.
- Methods of presenting project imagery.
- How to prioritize your design projects.
- What you need for project descriptions.
The Squeeze
My Wishlist for Adobe Portfolio in 2024
Over the summer of 2023, I did a deep dive into the world of Adobe Portfolio. I wrote articles about the best themes, best examples, Adobe Portfolio hacks, and whether you should use it or not. I even put together a free mini-course that covers a lot of the questions I received over on my TikTok page. In the beginning I was very hesitant to recommend Adobe Portfolio as a tool for your portfolio website because it seemed so limited. But after much digging, I found the value within the platform and see how it can be a great resource for new and young designers just starting off.
While doing all of this I thought to myself, why don't I write an article about what I wish Adobe Portfolio would fix in the future that would potentially make it an even better resource for you and your design portfolio website. So here is my preliminary outline for my Adobe Portfolio wishlist in 2024.
First, let's talk about the three things Adobe Portfolio does well currently. One of the big reasons why I like Adobe Portfolio is because it takes a lot of the guess work out of the 'designing your portfolio' process. Essentially you select a theme and you follow that layout with little customization. Second, the 2-way sync to Behance I think is underrated since Behance still to this day has a thriving community of creatives and is a destination for many to hire good talent. Third, Adobe Portfolio has you covered when it comes to making sure your design portfolio website looks good on multiple devices.
Now, let's talk about my wishlist. Here are five of the major opportunities I see that Adobe can make to greatly improve Adobe Portfolio as a solid platform for your design portfolio website.
- Interface Upgrade: The current interface of Adobe Portfolio is stuck in the past and is very confusing to navigate through and find some of the most valuable features of the platform.
- Improved Style Guide Process: One of the features I didn't know about that really changed how I saw Adobe Portfolio was the ability to define a style guide. Many other platforms do this in a variety of ways but I would love if Adobe Portfolio made this one of the first steps you take to creating your portfolio website.
- Interactive Elements: While Adobe Portfolio offers you the ability to add an image grid and create multiple column layouts. I think we could all benefit from elements such as image carousels, sliders, video backgrounds, and other elements that can really elevate your presentation.
- Customizable Video Player: Surprisingly, I found a lot of people asking about the video player feature within Adobe Portfolio. Did you know you could embed a video from Youtube? I didn't either. Anyway, whether you use the stock video player or embed a Youtube video, I would love to see the ability to customize the size, autoplay, and hide elements such as the play button.
- New Theme Templates: I'm not exactly sure how old the existing Adobe portfolio themes are but I can tell you they are definitely old. Some of the are stuck in 2015 while others definitely have dust collecting on them. I think this would be a big win for Adobe and think it would put the platform just under some of the other leading competitors such as Framer, Squarespace, and Wix.
I will leave you with these five for now and will write a full article including my major and minor improvements that I think would be amazing for 2024.
I would love hear from you! What do you think of my preliminary suggestions? Do you have any improvements in mind that you would like to see? Send me a reply to this email and I'll add them to the list and maybe we can bully Adobe into making it happen.
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