If you’re a designer or artist and you’re looking for your first job, you may be wondering: ‘Do I need a Portfolio or a CV? You may even be wondering what the difference is between the two.

As designer or artist, more than any other profession, your talent is there to be looked at. The whole industry that you want to work in is about style, technique and visual ideas and so you’ll need to put together a Portfolio so that Employers can look at your work and see what you have to offer. You can add your CV details to your portfolio, so that what you have is a portfolio of work that contains your CV.

Setting up the portfolio

A Portfolio is sometimes called a book and it contains all your best work and ideas. You can start one simply by buying a ‘portfolio case’ and placing your drawings, sketches and visual ideas in it. How you lay your work out and display it is up to you, but obviously, it needs to be clear and appealing to the reader.

Increasingly, artists put their work into an ‘on-line portfolio’ or create a digital portfolio. In this case all your work, if it is in hard copies, needs to be scanned and then uploaded onto a computer for laying out into a document.

As a general rule, if you want to work in art direction, graphic design, web design or advertising, you’ll probably want to create an online portfolio to display your work. This way you can send it via email to the employers who have asked to see it.

Some artists, cartoonists and illustrators still like to show their work in hard-copy form, i.e. it is displayed in a portfolio case, and then taken or posted to an employer. This obviously runs the risk of it being damaged or lost, so you have to take care where you send it.

Either way, your Portfolio should be as attractive as possible, but it should also get your ideas across. How you lay it out also says something about you; so if it’s cluttered it reflects on your own skills. Creativity is part of the game.  For example if you are applying for positions in graphic design, advertising, social media, marketing, film, TV and art-direction, your CV is being looked at by people who understand ‘where you’re coming from’.  So you should demonstrate your creativity and make sure your use of colour, font styles and images are ‘current’.

A few tips for a good looking portfolio:

- Use plenty of white space and avoid clutter
- Try to ‘balance’ the portfolio, so that it is not too full of one kind of design or illustration. You need to show variety.
- Try to follow a ‘theme’ or a ‘timeline’ to give your Portfolio a sense of order.
- Constantly update your portfolio so that it doesn’t get stale.

You can place your work in date order, or you can place it in categories such as: conceptual ideas and practical ideas. You may wish to show work that’s more likely to appeal to the employer you are going to. You can always tailor it to the work that they do; such as fashion or cars or whatever.

Adding your CV

Although you are a designer, you need to provide a CV and we deal with this in detail on this website.  You can attach your CV separately to your Portfolio or incorporate it within your lay-out. Either way your CV details should be clearly laid out and follow a classic structure, i.e. name at the top, references at the bottom, etc and it shouldn’t be more than two pages at the most. 

As a designer, you don’t need to worry unnecessarily about your CV being visually striking; it’s your portfolio that employers will be looking at.