Creating a personal portfolio to tell your story
Your portfolio is an essential tool in establishing your online brand and identity
Hello Hello 👋
In the December of 2020, when I was applying for product roles and networking with people online, I always felt that my resume wasn’t enough to convey who I was and what my story is. I would often spend time talking about my background and journey with prospective employers and connections before getting into the meat of a conversation. It left me with a desire to establish my online identity and brand to effectively convey my story. This was the time I decided to invest time in creating a portfolio. My portfolio complemented my resume and I was able to connect with people at a deeper level once they had seen my portfolio.
BUT creating a personal portfolio is an elusive task. It is one of those things that you want to prioritize doing but is hard to do so while juggling between applications, interviews, networking and everything in between. Also, before getting started with creating a portfolio, the scariest thought is to answer questions like: where to start, what to showcase, which tools to use, who is the audience, will it be worthy of sharing or not etc.
In this post, I will breakdown the process of creating a portfolio into small and manageable tasks and make the possibility of publishing your portfolio an achievable reality. Before we jump in, I’d like to highlight that the outcome of the process below will be a simple single page portfolio with no bells and whistles and achieve a single goal: Tell your story!
Step 1: Define the goal for your portfolio 🥅
As the first step, it is important the identify the need for a portfolio. Defining why you need a portfolio will lay down the foundation for how you plan, create, and position your portfolio. You might want to create a portfolio to:
Boost your online presence and strengthen your brand.
Showcase your background and experience to potential employers.
Use it as a resource for networking.
Tell your story in a compelling way.
Step 2: List down the themes you want to communicate 🗣️
Once you have defined the purpose for your portfolio, write down the key themes that you’d like to talk about which align with your purpose. Define these themes at a high level, for example:
Step 3: List down the key ideas under each theme 💡
After listing down 7–8 themes, create an affinity mapping with key ideas that you want to talk about under each theme.
I recommend using physical post-its to brainstorm these ideas as it gets the creative juices flowing.
Step 4: Prioritize the themes 1️⃣2️⃣3️⃣
Decide the order in which you’d want each theme to appear on your portfolio. Consider as if you are preparing for an elevator pitch. Think about what you’d want someone to definitely see if they only had 30 seconds to look at your portfolio.
Step 5: Create a few low-fidelity prototypes ✏️
Use paper and pencil to do some rough sketches for how you’d want each of your panel on the portfolio to look. Stick to 1 panel for each of the identified themes. You’ll put these panels in sequence based on the prioritization above. Your goal for this step should be to identify the layout and hierarchy of the information. You could even use an online tool like Balsamiq for this step.
Step 6: Pick a tool 🛠️
By this step you have answered the why and what for your portfolio which is the biggest hurdle to overcome. Now you just need to pick a tool and implement ideas that you already have on paper, which is not tough! Do not get over ambitious about how you will be implementing your portfolio. The purpose of your portfolio is to tell your story and not show how much time and effort you have put in to create one. The tools that I am recommending below require no coding or even technical background.
Canva — This one is my favorite! There are 100s of templates that you can choose from and creating a portfolio is as easy as creating a presentation. You’ll get a rich and responsive portfolio which can be published as a website. Here are some templates.
Notion — This is a great option if you are looking to create a minimal portfolio with interlinked pages. Notion as well gives you an option to publish your portfolio as a website. Here is a guide on getting started.
Webflow — This will involve a little bit of a learning curve but gives you the ability to completely customize the look and feel. Portfolio created in Webflow can look really fancy. There is a Skillshare class which helps you get started with Webflow. Here are some templates.
Wordpress — This needs no description and is the standard for creating any type of website.
These tools will help you ship your portfolio efficiently with minimum learning curve. In case you were curious, I created my portfolio in Webflow, also in the spirit of learning Webflow!
Step 7: Make it mobile responsive📱
I cannot stress enough about how important this is! More than 80% of your traffic is going to be from mobile devices. Tools that I have suggested above give you an out-of-the-box mobile responsive website but in case you decided to use something else, make sure that your portfolio is mobile responsive.
Step 8: Plug in some basic analytics 📈
You’d naturally want to understand metrics around engagement and know what is working/not working on your portfolio. Prepare a list of questions that you’d like to answer from analytics and pick an analytics solution accordingly. For example, when I had published my portfolio I wanted to understand which acquisition channel (LinkedIn, Twitter, Email, Resume) was performing the best for me.
The analytics solution should also be compatible with the tool of your choice for example, Webflow gives you an out-of-the-box analytics solutions and you do not need anything separately.
Step 9: Gather a lot of feedback 📝
Share your portfolio with peers and seek feedback on whether they are understanding you story in a way that you wanted them to understand in. This is one of those steps that should never end.
Step 10: Keep your portfolio up-to-date 🔄
Once you have achieved your desired objective with the portfolio, don’t let it become a stale property on the internet. Keep it up to date with the latest events and updates. You never know when you might need it again. You do not want to be stuck in a position where it becomes too much of a time investment to update and use it again!
Some personal portfolios for inspiration ✨
My wife, Richa’s portfolio - MS student at UC Berkeley
P.S. - This was originally published on Medium on October 5, 2020.
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Sincerely,
Tanay 👋
Supremely helpful! Thanks Tanay!