Transcripts
1. Class Intro: Hey, my name's Jeremy. I'm a brand identity designer from Sydney, Australia. In this class, I'm going to share with you how to craft amazing portfolios. If you're a junior designer, a beginner, or maybe you're a graphic designer with some years of experience, this class will be great for you because I'm going to share with you how to structure your portfolio, how to structure case studies as well, how to craft case studies that have more of an impact. We're also going to dive into how to craft spectacular mock-ups that really have attractive cover images that draw attention. We're going to be talking about some practical tips on how to use Behance, also things on how to craft a landing page using a Webflow template and also talking about my best practices, tips, and tricks that I've learned over the past eight years, as well as reviewing student portfolios which I've done for a little while. For your class project, what we're going to be doing is working on a Behance case study, so you can actually work on a previous client project you've had. If you've had no client projects, I can put a brief where you can actually practice and create that and upload it to Behance, so then you can start building your portfolio. If you're a junior designer, a graphic designer, or just a beginner who wants to get into design and start building your portfolio, then definitely check out this class and enroll. I look forward to seeing you in there, and let's start designing.
2. Why do you need a portfolio : Why do you need a portfolio? I truly believe a portfolio in the creative industry is so important because without your work being seen, you're basically invisible. I love the book Austin Kleon, and it's called Show Your Work. If you don't show your work, how are you going to get noticed? It's the only way to become known by putting your work out there, no matter what level you're at, you need to constantly put out your design work, put out your art so you get noticed. The thing is, most clients won't really know what you do or what type of work you do unless you're a crazy, you're like salesmen or you have a lot of word of mouth or a lot of traffic going to your sites to actually generate those leads. But social media can be a portfolio. I do love Instagram, which is a great place to post images, you can have the pretty grid and you don't need to have a website. But I truly believe these days that having a website is really going to benefit you because you have so much more control over the decide design, how you create your portfolio, and I just loved that functionality and the ability to just share a link and that's always encouraged, save a domain name of your personal name, because you can always use it as a portfolio. Now, my three reasons why you need a portfolio is Number 1, you need to show your level of skill. When someone looks at your portfolio right away, they should be able to tell you the level of skill and ability that you have as a creative designer. Number 2 is to attract an audience. Every time you build or put out work, you're going to gain designers and clients to see your work, so you're going to build that up. Number 3 is to actually build more potential clients and get more leads. The more leads the better because then you can get more work. Then number 4 is you want to build a body of work. We've seen all those is artist like Picasso, and they've generated all this art over their whole lifetime, is the same with design. You want to start building up this body of work. Over the years, as you keep pursuing your dream and becoming a designer, then you have a vast array of projects to show, to share, and it's going to help you succeed in the long run. Now, I want to share some portfolio sites that you can use to actually put your portfolio online if you're not going to get a website. Number 1 is Cavalry freelancing and The loop. Those two sides are based in Australia. I used those when I was a bit younger. I'm also on Cavalry freelancing at the moment. I was in there past few years and it's good for extra freelance work when you're working with agencies and stuff like that. If you're an Australian, definitely check those sites out, they're really easy to use. Now, some other suggestions I recommend. These are the top five that I think are the better ones. Number 1 is Behance. The cool thing about Behance is it's actually free and it's easy to set up, easy to put your portfolio online, and it's one of the more popular platforms because it's owned by Adobe. I do recommend that. Number 2 is Dribble. I've been on Dribble for many years now. The only problem is that it's invite only. You need to get an invite from someone, whether it be another designer who is already on the platform. But overall the grid on there, the community is lovely and the design quality on there is really great. Number 3 is Carbon made. This isn't a cheap option. The pricing usually ranges between $8 and $12, depending where you are, if it's USD or whatever currency you're in. But it's a really simple tool. I really love it because it's drag-and-drop modules. You can add galleries, you can add grids, and it's just easier to get into the flow of it. You can customize topography and the brand colors and whole bunch of stuff. Carbon made is another really good viable option if you're just starting out. If you're a beginner and tight on the cash, I think that's a good suggestion. Number 4 is Webflow. This is my personal platform that I use to build all my websites for clients as well as for myself. You can see an example of my website, I built it all from scratch using Webflow. I didn't use any code, basically just the tools that Webflow provides, and I just love using it. It's really simple, really fun, and it's easier to add animation as well if I want to go crazy with that. Then lastly is Wix editor X. I think this is a good, cheap alternative as well. It's very similar to Webflow, but it's more for beginners. The thing is, if you're a designer or want to work with clients, you can use it for that reason as well. It's flexible, drag and drop as well, very simple to use, and I think these are top ones to recommend.
3. How to write about yourself: I want to talk a little bit about how to write about yourself. I got a question from one of the students on Skillshare. How do they write about themselves if they didn't have the experience. I just want to touch base on that. You want to avoid talking about me, me, and make it self-centered focus. You want to inject your personality by sharing things about what you do, things on the side, things about your life. But the thing is, no one wants to hear an essay. They don't want to hear your life story. They really just want to scan through your page, and see if it's relevant to them, and see if you're a cool person. I really try and write something that's really true to who I am, but trying to focus on how I've impacted others, and how my design business or me personally, how I help others, and help businesses along the road. Remember, a potential client could be reading your About page. See how you can help them. Write about things that are how you've grown businesses, or you can talk about how you reached a certain goal or achieved something. Those things are really key because it sounds professional, but at the end of the day, you can talk about things that are relevant to your life, and always try and use your own words. Don't try and sound cool or witty, just keep it really sweet, keep the paragraphs really short, and not to wordy when you're writing about yourself. If you've got a bit of experience, here are some things you can mention in your About page or when you're writing a blog for a website or things like that. Number 1 is accolades and awards. If you've won something of being in a competition, and you won, that's really cool to mention, side projects as well if you've been a part of a side project that you've worked on, that's really cool as well. Maybe events, maybe you volunteered at a local design conference, something like that, that's really cool to add. Also talking about past clients, you can put their logos on there. You can also mention your personal belief systems and values. What do you value in life? I think really people love resonating and talking about that. I think it's really important. Now, maybe you're a beginner, and you don't really have prior experience, you haven't really worked with real clients. What are some things you can actually talk about? One thing is that you can actually mention things that inspire your work, your thinking, and the way you work. It has certain designers, artists, maybe a certain visual style from the past that you really like. Maybe it's a location, a museum, or a place you've traveled through that really inspire you. Number 2 is your passions. What is your ultimate goal? Your ultimate dream. Is it to work for Disney? Is it to work for Apple or something? Maybe that's really interesting to someone to really inject that into the text, that could be really interesting. Another thing you can do is actually mention what you do outside of work like on the weekends. Do you enjoy going to the gym or to the beach or do you do bird watching. Do you like going to movies or going to certain events. Mention some of those things, don't go too deep into it, but you can actually bring up some of those personal traits, and personal flavors, and taste that you really like to do outside of designing, and creativity. Then another thing that's important is to have a call to action. Have a call to action that says, let's start a project, book a call, get in touch, let's get a coffee, something like that, that really inspires someone to take action, especially if it's up on your About page, that's an opportunity to get in contact with a potential client. Then lastly, you can mention 3-5 values that you really believe in, and things that you apply in your business. For me, a couple of them is that we strive for excellence. So I try and put as much effort into my work as possible. Then another value that I have is I'm people first. I really value people, and I'm really friendly, and believe in kindness, and peace, and just being helpful to people. For me, people first, and excellence is two values that I really love to talk about, and that's on my About page. You can check that out on my website, but you can share some of those things, and I think that these tips will really help you when you're writing your About page, writing about yourself, and things that are going to really make you stand out when someone lands on your website.
4. Case study vs Portfolio: What's the difference between a case study and a portfolio? First thing I want you to do is get rid of the term portfolio. We've grown up in design school or college and we're used to saying this term portfolio but realistically in the real world we want to talk about case studies. I want you to change the language because we want to make sure that we are creating case studies and not just pretty images to check up online because we want to have more of an impact, more of an effect when we talk about our work, we're going to be more professional and actually land those bigger projects. A creative case study, I'm going to paraphrase it for you but here is the general definition of that. It's basically a process or record of research into the development and design of a particular project over a period of time. It's all about having a process and showing that in a nice visual way to your potential client or someone who's viewing your page. I want to share some examples of this but it's a really great way of actually portraying and showing your work in a nice manner that's really professional. You always got to remember that clients only care about seeing results. They care about what you can actually do from them. They always focus on their business and making money and improving their own business and brand. You've got to think in their shoes. How can we make it more relevant to them? Instead of making it us focused, that I'm a cool designer, I'm this that. Try and focus it around the client. That's why we need to develop case studies instead of this portfolio of this nice images or nice logos we need to show the results and show it in a clean, succinct way that's going to be simple and easy for them to digest. Here are some questions that I usually ask when I'm creating a case study. Does this show what they can do for me? Did their client achieve similar results I want? These are questions that are in the mind of the customer, of the client. Picture them saying this or asking these questions to themselves. Number 3 would be, how did they work with them? Number 4 is, do you have a clear process? When they land on your website, they see a case study or their own Behance or whatever site and they see a nice case study, they're going to be asking these questions, can this designer help me? Do they have a simple process? Can this designer achieve similar results? Because maybe you worked with the cleaning business and maybe this client that's looking at his website has a cleaning business as well and they want to see, what did you actually create? What are the deliverables? What are the results? Did you increase sales? Did you increase brand awareness? Etc. These are some key questions that are going through their mind, so always consider this when you're creating a case study. I want to show you my old portfolio website which was years ago, back in 2014. This is one of my older ones. I used Squarespace for this. Squarespace is a cool template based website, similar to the other ones that I mentioned. You can see here it was pretty basic. I had some student project in there, the mockups one that amazing. It was really simple and I just tried to share my work just to get some freelance gigs. It did help me get some earlier jobs and get some fillings book but that was my old portfolio. Here's some old shots of my CV and my PDF portfolio. I have some other shots but here's what it looked like. When I send my PDF over an email to an agency or to a client, usually it's in a PDF with some pages and my CV or resume and that was what it looked like, kept it really simple. I used a template that I got off Creative Market, just really topographic based. Obviously, I recommend having these bars. I don't have that anymore but this is just an old one that I used to send when I used to apply for jobs and freelancing and stuff like that. I encourage you, we all start somewhere. It wasn't the best work, it wasn't the best but I grew and I learnt and I evolved. The lessons that I did learn was that my cover image is really ugly. The mockups weren't professional. They didn't look like $10,000. The layout and typography was lacking. It wasn't really professional and up to the standard that we like. Another one was some work, looks like student work. The work, it's okay to show student work if you're starting out but for me at the time I wanted to have a bar of standards in it. It's just my student work wasn't really that great at the time when I was applying for jobs though there's no proper context or the case study format. Just like a lot of times I was just showing images with a bit of texts. I wasn't like breaking it down or anything into a case study. Another lesson was, it doesn't look exciting or highly professional. Some of these things are subjective but in my opinion, I knew I could do better. I had more potential. Then lastly, inconsistent imagery and projects. You can see some of the imagery is pretty wacky, it's all different, some look photography, some look like a magazine, editorial. It's like what do I really do? Do I do branding? Do I do logos? It was mixed up and same thing is here I just checked images, mockups, and stuff but it wasn't cohesive. Here's a case study example of a client I worked with in 2020. You can see this is from Macquarie Business School and obviously it's not laid out like this sideways on Behance or on my website but you can see it was consistent, it was powerful, it was just overall, looks professional, looks clean, looked good, and achieved the brief and also my website, for example, down here you can see I break down the results, the role, etc. You can see the testimony that I got from the client. She said the posters, EDM banners and log files are all perfect. Thank you for great work. Working with you is like a breeze and we commend your professionalism and flexibility. That was a great confirmation and I'm very thankful for that. In the next module, I'm going to show you how to structure the case study but hopefully this gives you a bit of insight and example. What are the takeaways from this? It shows more of the project context. It shows better high-quality mockups and presentation compared to my old portfolio. It looks professional. It stands out with near the icons. The post is everything just looks really cool and relevant, more details and showing all the deliverables, as well. Case study has deeper descriptions and it's laid out nicely, so you can lay it out. You can add more design elements to it and structure be better. Also there's consistency with an overall feeling and vibe and personality to it. I feel like this is a better way to do it. Separate string portfolio, checking out little couple images, try and create a case study that's more in depth, that has more weight to it, that's going to have more details and is going to be a lot better for you in the long run.
5. Where I get Inspiration: Now I want to show you some examples of where I get my case study inspiration from when I'm putting my portfolio. Here are some sites that really inspires me. Number 1 is Pentagram and I know this is a big agency and you might get scared. I was like, "I can't do that quality of work." It's okay if you're beginning or starting out you can still get some ideas. What I'll do, I'd usually come around and look at some of these projects. For example, if I want to click on League of Legends, which is nice and see See they created their work and see how they talk about their work. I look at the imagery, how they created that beautiful logo as we can see here. They add like testimonials, they add some text in there. I really love how they add these little bits in there. You can see some more imagery. Some that must have done a brand campaign advertising. You can see mockups there, that's really cool, as well, beautiful. Typically, I would just get some ideas like, how did they use the mock-ups? How are they creating these things? Obviously, in Photoshop they're using the basic platforms that we all use. That's a great example. Let's see if we can find another example here. Let's click on, Canvas, SAAS recruitment platform. They use animation, they use a lot of fun stuff. Remember, we can keep it simple, nice mockups, keeping it really branded, that's really cool. I thought they did that. Scroll through. I recently to get some ideas and sometimes I'll right-click and actually save as and save the picture or screen print it. I mean print screen it, screenshot and then chuck in the photo for later on, maybe I want to create something like that. Stories there for Instagram. Website responsive, beautiful. The design system icons, amazing. This is one site that I love going on. The work is just such high-quality. Second one is We are COLLINS, another big studio. But we can learn so much because they put out such great quality. You can see Spotify, Twitch, all bunch of stuff. I really love the Twitch one, it's a good one. I think this one called Crane actually won a few awards. If we scroll through here, you can see some stationary. I think this was for a printing company, as well. Just lovely mockups. The presentation is just really good. Sometimes it's a photography, sometimes it's a mockup but I really love how they lay things out. The imagery is very strong. They don't add too much texts in to their ones. Obviously, if I just go back and click you see the little plus button, Project Information. It shows the team involved, it shows whole bunch of texts which is a lot of texts but they hide in case people don't really want to read it. Here's another good one and that I love looking at. The next is Behance. For Behance, what I usually do is I type in brand identity in the search bar. I press, "Enter." Then usually what comes up is a lot of different brand identities. A whole bunch here. As we can see, there's so many cool stuff, so much cool stuff I mean. For example, let's just check out this one, Tutch. Breaking down project description, seeing the posters in the designs, logo. I'm not sure what type of brand this is but just looking at the images, looking at how they created the campaign and everything like that. That's really cool. One Tutch, interesting. Well that's a nice one. What else? This one is 50K. La Mensa Cafe and Restaurant. Looks like it's in Arabic. I'm just going through the process not to envy them or to try and copy them but to see what things can I learn, what can I adapt into my process? How can I make my images look that good? Can I get similar mockups somewhere? Can I create high-quality like this? Those are the questions you should be asking yourself. Then lastly, abduzeedo.com is another great one. What I'd like to do is, at the top click on Collections. You want to click on Branding and they should show you all the brand identity type of stuff. One here, villa 953. If you scroll down, you've got a whole bunch of different ones, even this one looks really cool, Minimalist Branding for Twig Learning Center gives you project breakdown at the start, it's simple and clean. It gives you the goal of the target audience and breaks on the project. Really nice mockups here, leaving the design here, so much little details and printing techniques. If you're a digital designer and you're not doing printing stuff that's all right, that's totally fine but we can use this to our advantage. I'm just scrolling through here. I think that's really nice. You can click Instagram to what this would take me. It took me to the studio, that's crazy. Then what I like to do is I try and find their websites. Same thing with b hands, as well. I would like go and find the creator. Say, for example, let's go. Let's try and find another one. Australian National University, that's pretty cool. Then I go to the top, look at multiple owners. There's multiple people here and I'll basically right-click and go to their pages and then click on their website. If you click on their website in the performer left-hand side, click the website. Typically this is how I find their work. I start looking at the case studies and this is how I get some inspiration if I would like someone's work. You're going to do a bit of positive stalking for inspiration's sake, Instagram and whole bunch of different stuff. Look, I just found a whole bunch of cool identities from this company. It's a bit slow in loading but beautiful stuff.
6. How to structure case studies: Let's talk about how to structure a case study. I want to give you my breakdown and my formula on how I structure it. So when you're creating case study for your website or your blog, that it's going to stand out and then it's going to make sense and be very clear. The first key parts of the structure of a case study is the introduction. You want to have a description of the design project. What's the business about? What's the general description? Number 2 is the solution. What was your final design solution or concept? What were the specific motif or pattern? Did you create a strategy? Did you go with the specific idea? Was there a specific design aesthetic style that you developed or created? Number 2 is the solution that you created for the problem. Number 3 is the problem so identify the problem or challenge of the client business. Was it to generate leads? Was it because they were lacking getting sign-ups to the e-book or to the event that they created? Were they're not getting conversions on their learning page? What was the problem and how did you cover that solution overall? Number 4 is the benefit. What was a positive effect it had on the brand? Did your design solution have a positive effect? What was that benefit or that positive effect? Did it increase a certain percentage or did it have a better brand awareness? Did it give uses more clarity on the processes and things that your business does? Those are a few examples of the benefit. Number 5 is result. What was the tangible result? Was it more downloads, was it the subscribers, was it a revenue increase? Result is similar to a benefit, but result is more like tactical based and more like about the numbers and quantifiable when it comes to something like objective. Number 6 is the testimony. What was the client experience of working with you? Whenever you try and get a testimonial, try and ask for their experience, how did they enjoy the process of working with you? Did the project achieve the goal and results? Also try and get a solid one that's not subjective or objective to the project. Here's the main structure points when you're creating a case study. Number 1 is you want to write your main points first before jumping into a design or layout. Because you want to get clear on the goals, is going to help you understand and explain your ideas very clearly. The second thing is that it makes things simple when you think about project in stages. So intro description, you have the strategy, the main concept design. You go through the other design assets or deliverables you created, then you go down to the bottom of the testimonial, and the final thing. Write your main points first before jumping into in design. You can use Notion, you can use a note taking app, whatever you use to really write down the key points fast. Number 2 is you want to keep it brief. People scan pages, people don't read as much anymore because of technology, social media so write short, 3-4 sentence paragraphs for each section. Keep it short and snappy. Write captions for images and bold headlines and short paragraphs typically do the trick really well. Number 3 is know your role on the project and give credit to other team members if there were any on the project. For example, maybe you worked with an agency and you were the logo designer, and maybe you worked with a photographer and maybe an illustrator. You need to make sure that you clearly outline what was your role. That I was just logo design and you didn't do the whole project, so you can just list it down in a list. I think be specific and give credit to all the other members that were on that project. You want to make sure that you always understand what you specifically did, what part you played, and be honest and truthful. Don't try and lie and make it sound like you did everything when it's not true. Number 4 is right in your internal voice, be yourself, add your personality. Don't be afraid to just be who you are. Obviously be professional and show your personality, but try to avoid designer jargon and imagine the client reading it. Keep things simple in simple terms, but speak in active positive voice so when the client reads it or someone is reading it, then it makes sense and it's clear. Number 5 is, show you a process and provide context about the design project. You can actually show progress shots. It doesn't have to be nitty-gritty sketches or even UI, UX sketches if you're into UI stuff. Some people show word maps and all those things. You can show their stuff, but try and make it a bit more high fidelity. So add a nice small cup if you're going to show it like that, it just adds a bit more possess to it. Don't just show images shared text breaking down from concept solution. Make sure that you're captioning the images and outlining what they are. That is just going to help overall when you're providing contexts, being objective. Show all the process from thinking strategy to the actual design solution. Number 6 is craft each case study uniquely to fit the project and change up the layout. You can have a template. I typically use the same template where it's just a nice header image and then starts off with the description and the role and the goal and all that stuff and then it just has image breaking scroll down. It's easy if somebody's on a phone, they can just flick through the pages. But I try and make each project a little bit different using different mockups. Adding trainees always use the same mockups, but I try and make it a bit unique in that way. Sometimes that can change up the layout like add a bit of text, add a bit of flavor and stuff like that. Now Number 7 is share client testimonials at the beginning or at the end. Because people scan, they might not go all the way to the end so maybe it's good to put it at the top, but typically at the end or in-between as pentagram does, you can put little testimonial from the client there. It just adds a bit of genuinesss to it. It also shows that it was a legit project. If it wasn't a client project, it was a side project, don't try and lie and add a fake testimonials, people will sniff it out. But what you can do is ask a designer, friend, or older director to look at the project that you created and say, can you give a little testimonial or feedback on it or just something to can pull to add there on a line like a mini testimonial. You can always ask that, just be genuine with it. Now, always check you have the right elements in your case study. It's always important that we keep our texts and our images really simple, clean. Then highlight the design. The design is the key point, the key star of the case study. You want to show it in a nice flow and a nice style. Just remember, make sure that all the elements are there, everything we talked about from the structure, showing the descriptions, the purpose, the process, and this is really going to make it a lot more fuller and better.
7. Making spectacular mockups: Let's talk about where you can find some beautiful mockups, some are free, some are paid, but I'm going to give you my recommendations of where you can get them. The top sides are Yellow Images, they have a lot of 3D high-fidelity mockups with big range, the only problem is it's a bit more expensive than other sides. You've got LS. Graphics, they have sales sometimes and they have really good packs as well. Really useful. Envato Elements is what I currently use, I have a subscription to them. They have mockups which I have used. There's a good guy or profile called Kavoon, as you can see on the screenshot on the right there and they've got a lot of really nice high-quality ones. Cars, backpacks, TVs, technology, iPhone 12s, etc. They're really good. Design Cuts usually has bundles as well. They have one every month, not a mockup-based one but when they do release a mockup one, I usually invest in that. I have over 400 gigs worth of mockups on my hard drive. I bought a lot in the past, really good. Mr. Mockup is another good one. Mockup World and Graphic Burger usually have a lot of free mockups. If you're someone that's tired of money, definitely check it out. Gallons and free mockups. Sometimes you can actually go on Behance and type Free Mockup and you can find some links on it and it'll take you to some site and you can download stuff. That's another quick tip. Mockup Cloud is good and also Pixeden, a bit of an older one but they have nice specific ones which is actually really nice. Here are three programs or softwares I recommend using to create and manipulate mockups. Number 1 is Artboard. studio. They also sell mockup packs but they did create this Artboard studio where you can actually use it in the browser. It's basically like photoshop, but you can use it within your browser, it's actually affordable, it's really good to use and they give away trial I think, which is really cool. I personally use Adobe Photoshop, which I'll show you in a minute how I create my mockups but Photoshop is excellent, it's a good tool, obviously, you can buy it by itself or you can get it in the Creative Cloud. Then the alternative option, which is a lot cheaper, it's around $50-70, no subscription fee is Affinity Photo. Basically similar to Photoshop, really great features and you can use that to create mockups and create your images and I think it's a really good alternative to Photoshop. What you want to do when you're thinking of making mock-ups, here are some tips that I recommend. You always want to think of the brand, the colors, the typography, the patterns, the visual language. Don't just slap the logo on everything. Try and bring the brand together. Do you have patterns? Do you have messaging? Do you have icons that you can use? Do you have background images that you can implement? All the assets that you have, try and make it relevant and keep it cohesive and make sure that it's all connected together in some form or fashion. Think of the layout and how you can show off the brand. Think of how you can show off certain aspects. Maybe it's a business card that has a nice embossing with a thick material. Try and find a mockup like that. If it's a banner or a cool TV, YouTube thing, try and find a nice computer mock-up, whatever. Try and think of the layout, think about the background. Can you add bold colors? Can you add a pattern? Can you add an overlay or an icon? Try and think of the layout and the composition. Can you add things to enhance or improve on the actual mock-up itself? All these little details do count. Think about customizing background and by adding texture, I love looking at grunge textures. You can use things like cement, bricks, wall textures, there's a whole bunch of stuff you can use in the real world. Think of the real world and nature, and how you can incorporate some of those textures into the backgrounds to make it feel more lively, to make it feel realistic. In the real world when you stick a poster on the wall, it's usually crinkled and it's got stuck on the cement or whatever. Think about how you can make it realistic. Then also try to mimic real printing effects. As I said before, if you're having an emboss or UV spot or a foil stamp effects or gold foil, whatever it is, a letterpress effect, try and find a mockup that is showing that effect so when you put the design on it, that it represents the real-world design that you've created. Those are my tips when you're creating these mockups. Now, let's do a little bit of a question experiment time. I want to One you what looks better? We've got four logos that I've done for previous clients here, over the last few years and you can see I'm just showing the logo with the background color. It still looks decent and fun and it shows off the logo, which is great but it's not having that visual impact. I'm going to show you on the next slide what it could look like. Here the cover images that I've changed instead of just showing the logos like we did in this one, we've got full mockups on the same brand. You can see the whiskey I'm showing the theme on a coastal and then putting some brand elements around it. You've got Bagheri hair, I'm showing a letterhead and the pattern, seeing how that can be used maybe on a thank you card or something. Then we've got the other two down at the bottom, you can see a business card mockup and then obviously like a poster design/mockup packaging that really it just captures the brand and what it's all about. I've put four benefits, it's high visual impact, looks professional, it's more interesting to look at the composition, and it's also bold and stands out. I always say the power of mockups is just so much beneficial, it's so powerful. Let's jump into Photoshop and let's start to play around and I'll show you how I created a mockup for one of these clients that I did. I'm going to show you a few mockups of a design that I did for a local business, one of my friends from church, it was a very small startup, just one or two people and they do a recruitment company for disability type services and company. You can see here we got a nice mockup business card, here was another version that I did, a couple of different concepts and then also how I created. This almost very simple, just showing the inside of the services booklet. Creating this booklet that can be used for digital and print, and that's what I designed, it's really just to showcase what their business is all about. It's like a capability service list. Then here was couple of more detailed showing the cover, the inside, adding some little elements like little phone and headphones just to make it feel more premium and feel more casual. I created these mockups all in Photoshop, so if I jump into Photoshop now, you can see this is the bare bones of what I have. Typically what tends to happen is you might go and buy a mockup and you can see if I go to Adobe Bridge, so for example I'm going to go to Mockup Cloud editorial. Because I have a lot of mockups, I typically use bridge, and you can see all these different mockups that I have. Some of them have pre-scenes and typically, I would use one of these scenes and then start applying it. But I typically like to customize it as well. As you can see here some mockups here. If I go back, there's the branding one as well. This one's really good. These come before the pre-made scenes here. But then we can also build up my own. As you can see, if I press space bar, you can see some of these. I can use separate elements and create my own one, if I like. You can see I double-clicked. Typically for like this, what I'll do is I'll locate the one that I want. For example, maybe this rolled paper and then I drag and drop it into my scene like this. You can see now I can edit that. I just want to make sure that I press "Control T" on the folder. The right-hand side, you can see my layers. It created a folder here as you can see. I want to make sure that I'm moving the folder and not just the shadow by itself because you can see it's all separate. I'm going to turn that one off. But basically, I create this little scene using some of the editorial or things like that. You can see that the phone and the other little elements, I haven't really designed any extra things there, but I'm going to go to the open page. You can this page, I'm going to open the folder. You see we've got two smart objects. When you see this little icon with a little paper, that means the smart object, you can double-click it. Now, it's going to take you to this other page, which is a PSB. Let me just close this. It's linked to this mockup here, and it basically connects this page here. This is the area that I'm going to work in. Now, all I have to do is just go to where I had my design. I'm just going to locate one of the slide decks that I created. Let me drag in one of these. It's just a JPEG, it can be a PSD or whatever. Obviously, it's not the right size, so sometimes you got to customize it. But just for the sake of this video, you can see I'm just going to paste it and I'm going to scale it. You can see how I can scale things up and down. I might just send it out there. I'm going to go at a solid color. You click the little button at the bottom, click "Solid Color." Then what I'm going to do is double-click, and I'm going to put my mouse over the blue, select the background, and then press "Control S" to save it. Now once I do that, it saves it. Now if I go back to the other file up the top, it's going to save that. Now to edit the other side, I'll just go and double-click on the other replaced right in page as you can see. Each mockup has something different. Let's do that and press "Enter." If you want to create a design that fits the exact mockup, typically what I do is I press "Alt Control C." It's going to show me the canvas size. What I'll then do is create a canvas in Illustrator or wherever I designed the graphics, the same size as this. Then I'll make sure that everything fits nicely, so when I create the mockup, things are not going to get chopped off like it is now. Now if I go back, you can see that, that saved. Within five minutes, I'm already creating some really simple elements. I've already designed these elements from beforehand because I'm designing in Illustrator and InDesign. All the files are already there, I just saved them out as JPEGs and drop them in just like that. I'm going go to the other one, so I can turn off and on. I'll double-click that. Let's see. I'm going to load up the cover image there. As you can see, obviously the mockup, it's not fitting as it should, but that's okay. I'm going to press "Enter" press "Save, Control S" for shortcut. Then now you can see how that's fitting there in that mockup. Beautiful. Also go to the phone as well. I'll go to the phone, open that up, double-click on this. Now maybe I want to go to my delivery file. I can go to the logo. Like that and then just center it, so you can see I'm just holding shift. Hold shift and select your layers, press "Control T" and it gives you the transform tool. I can move things around, I can scale it, etc. I'm just going to use my eyeballs and center it. I'm going to close this one, press "Control S." and then boom, you've got this. You can see it's blending into the background. Now, this is a cool mockup, I can use this as a color image. I might have to clip it and I scale it down to 1920 by 1080, would probably be a good size. Let's see. The canvas and then I'd have to scale everything down. I'd have to select everything and then scale it all down to fit that size like that. It's better for online from a website, it's going to load a lot faster. You can also check out tiny PNG as well to compress images. Maybe I want to add some texture. Say for example, I'm going to go to My Resources. I'll go to textures. Maybe you would like a wall brick texture. We've got some of those wall textures. Let me see what we got here. What if you wanted to add maybe a marble texture or something like that, make it feel premium. I'm going to scale it up like this, bring it to the back. Then I'm going to change the blending mode now so I can go multiply. I can go maybe overlay as well works. You just want to scroll down to the bending modes and see what works. Usually, multiply is good and then I drop it down to maybe 30 percent. I can scale it a bit down. Now, we've got this marble texture. It feels like premium, it's all like a marble wall or something like that. That's how you add a bit of texture. Then what I'll do, I basically go to File. You can go Export, usually I'll export as a quick PNG, or Save for Web and you want to save it as a high-res JPEG. Usually, 90 quality is fine, I'm always keeping the size low. You can see 800 kilobytes which is fine. You can drop this down to make it smaller. But overall, I would say that and then basically I'm done and I can decide to use that. I will save into say that to Downloads folder. Then you can see that mockup. That's basically how I'll create a mockup for a brand that I've worked on before to update it to my case study on the portfolio website.
8. How to create attractive images: Let's dive into creating attractive cover images. When I think of attractiveness, I think of three key things and I want to talk about those in this video. The three key things are: cohesiveness, the wow factor, and quality over quantity. Let's talk a little bit about them. Cohesiveness is about letting your style shine through at the first glance. When someone lands on your page, on your website, they can usually tell within 10-20 seconds of your vibe, of your personality, of what style you create, whether you're a logo designer, a branded designer, or maybe you are in a specific niche for like restaurants or esports. They should be able to tell that really simply. The images should be very similar in terms of the mockups and the way it feels. The grid and the color images should look similar and consistent. If you're going to go for a vibrant look, make sure that if you do showing logos and it's, for example, one flat color and just a logo on top, make sure you try and keep that consistency across. If you're using a specific mockup like packaging, then try and keep a packaging mockup for each different case study that you have in your portfolio. You just want to make sure that you give that feeling that you're a specialist when they see it at first. Then if they want to dive deeper, they can click on the page to go deeper into each case study. The second key is the wow factor. Do you have that X factor? Is it wow, does it feel like a million dollars, does it feel premium, does it feel good, does it feel like they can trust you with their brand? It has to look premium. I always tell people, when I'm looking at portfolios, I'm like, does it feel like $5,000, $10,000. If that's the project prices you want and the higher paying clients, then your work should reflect that, you know what I mean? It doesn't matter if it's a fake project or a side project or a real client, it just needs to speak for itself. The work should feel good, high-quality to the point where it's going to make people want to email you, want to talk to you, and get in contact and see your prices or whatever. You want to make sure the visuals look amazing, that they aesthetic, that they're just powerful, that they're immaculate and detailed. When they look at it, it's just like so visually appealing and just wow. When I look at portfolio, sometimes I get that feeling I'm like, man, this is so awesome. When I look at this big agencies like Pentagram and we are Collins it's just really, really cool. Add as much detail as you can because remember, there's always a potential to have a client looking at your portfolio, make sure that it looks the best it can. Lastly is quality over quantity. It's better to show three solid profile pieces than 15 crappy ones. Just show your best work, show your best three case studies. Instead of us having a whole bunch of portfolio images of just little logos or little flyers or whatever, try and craft three in depth ones that go into detail and have heaps of mockups and have a campaign and many brand assets. It's way better because it shows that you have a more depth in your skill and your ability. You want to build out each project to the point where it's solid and dense enough. You can always go back after a client project ends to add extra mockups and build it more to make it even look better than what it originally was. I know someone asked the question, one of the school share students asked this, I always typically go back after I finish a project, hand it over to a client. What I'd like to do is just go back and get some fresh mockups and actually try and beef it up and make it look better, add some more mockups to the case study and then update it on my website or update it on my Behance, etc. Because I just know that the next client that comes along, you want to make sure that the project looks as big as it can be and it's not being fake, it's just you want to put effort, you want to look better and look greater and always improve yourself. That's the mindset you want to have. It's really cool. You can always go back and update your projects, add some more mockups, it's totally fine. I'm going show you a whole bunch of designers and studious that inspire me, that I feel they have really great cover images, attractive foliars and case studies. Let's start off with Rob Clarke. He's a hand-lettered logo design. He doesn't really show a case studies. He's more of a specialist wizard in logo design. He just shows his big logos for these big brands. His specific niche is a hand-lettered style or typography-based logo mocks, type mocks basically. You can see here this is his homepage. You can check him out on the website. It's another 10 side there. But his logos, they all black and white, consistent. They look beautiful and the logos just shine through here on his website, I think it's really cool. Next up is Jordan Wilson. He's a brand identity packaging guy. He also does photography and does a whole bunch of other stuff, but he really focuses on more of the brewery type of companies, say food and beverage industry. You can see some of his mockups here a lot of the times you can see he is showing a can or a bottle. If you go to his website, you can check it out. But I really loved that style. It's consistent, it looks premium, it feels really good. Another example is from socio design brand identity they're from the UK. I love that minimal feel, it just feels really premium. You can see all the main images he, obviously they've got more projects, but it feels like they're using a lot of stationary for their main mockups. You can see they're showing printing techniques. They're showing embossing or the gold foils. They're showing the business cards, whatever. It's consistent as soon as you jump on the website, feels minimal, feels premium, feels high-end. I think I like that about their website and their case studies. One of my friends, Rocky Roark, blue Blue Cyclops Design Co. He's focused on illustration mainly and brand identity. You can see his images, he uses a lot of bold designs, bold colors, especially in his logos he does a lot of little badges and really great with typography and illustration. I love how he breaks down his case studies. I really recommend you check out the Leaping Daisy one. He really breaks down his process. He shows sketches and stuff. I love how he lays out his case studies, it's just super awesome. Gif Studios is another one, they're from Portugal. You can see here some of the products they've done. A lot of the times they work with people who are experts like content creators and authors and speakers. You can see here the Bob Heilig and Million Dollar Coach, very similar logo designs. You can see some other different brands they work on. But I feel the image here looks good, looks nice. Adding the photography there, adding product shots. Their vibe feels really premium as well, it's really nice. Pentagram as we showed in a previous video, they really awesome brand identity. Solid, simple, clean, lots of white space. They're just highlighting the work. You can see sometime they use a lot of mockups, sometimes they just show the mock. You can see these two logos down here is showing the logos and then the other ones are showing mockups or showing a photo. Because Pentagram is a whole bunch of different designers around the world, it's going to have a different image or cover, but you can see it's very professional and I like how they add the texty. They've got the number of the project or whatever, super cool. Carpenter Collective, they focus on brand identity. Now, he focuses on, once again food and beverage packaging. You can see lots of restaurants. As you can see, bit of pasta here, some chicken shop. This is for a brewery. This is for a tortilla tiller company. Lots of illustration, lots of nice logos. They do a great job, smashing job. I just love the way they present and they're really showing a lot of packaging here. These ones are all packaging and then some vinyl stickers. But once you go into the project they show you some nice stuff. Next up is Jessica Strelioff brand identity designer. I really loved her kinside project. I thought that was really neat. But she's got these fun whimsical feeling on a project, but also just playfulness, especially with the logos. You get the icon here, some fun text, this image is bold colors. This one is bold colors too. Then these ones here are more minimal it should. But I just like how she presents, it just feels clean. Then see how she lays out the text below, it tells you the role and also the title. That's really good example. Lastly is Steve Wolf Design, stevewolf.co, branding and designers. I love the way that he presents really clean, minimal, nice combination logos and mocks. Then some of the mockups, like you can see here, they show posters, some really nice mockups, even packaging here. It feels consistent like all of the designs just feel really flat and nice. I feel this is another good example. These are some examples of some really great studio, some designers that I follow. I think that they do a really great job in creating amazing cover images, amazing mockups, and presenting it well on their website. You can check out other websites if you like, and get some inspiration.
9. Creative Briefs: I want to talk about the creative brief. This is how I approach it but remember, you can change things, you can add things, you can make it tailored to your process. Don't take my thing as the only way to do it but I'm just going to help you create a brief, whether it's for a client or for yourself. If you want to do a simple one page brief, typically this is how I do it. I've got an example on the right-hand side. When I'm writing a brief for myself or for my students in Mirror Academy, this is typically how I write it. I keep it brief and to the point with a clear objective. I talk about the audience, the main goal of the brand, also add the brand name and then the creative parameters or considerations. These are really great for side projects or fake challenge briefs. You also want to mention elements of the brand or the personality; so brand attributes, the USP or X factor, or the value proposition, also the deliverables that you'll be creating for the project. Then maybe a little bit of the timeline and then at the bottom I add a milestone or delivery specs. Usually milestones, I take that out. If it's just for a fake project for myself and I'd like inspiration, add images but overall, you want to keep it simple and summarize the parts. I just love the concept of a one page brief. It just makes things easy and simplified. I want to show you some design brief sites. If you're a designer that struggles to write your own briefs, what you can actually do is go to these four sides. Number 1 is briefbox.me. Second one is FakeClients.com, briefz.biz, and sharpen.design. Now each one of these have free briefs but they also have a priced option. I think briefz.biz and sharpen.design are completely free, but the first two do have a price option if you want more design briefs. These are my top sites to get those briefs so start practicing your skills of designing and building up your portfolio. Now what are the key things that we can add to make the brief more detailed and more tailored? The first things that you need to add is the date, project name, the person of contact, and the client email. That's pretty straightforward; that's always there. Then you've got the name of the brand. Always think about is there a concept behind the name? What does it mean? If you're doing naming for the brand as well, then you got to have to organize all that but most of the times the client will give you a name. What is the core business problem? What is the problem that you're facing and you're trying to tackle and trying to solve? You also want to talk about the brand values, the mission, and the vision, so where they see themselves in 5-10 years, what is their ultimate goal and what are the valleys where they stand for? Then you want to tackle the "what are the business services and products"? List them out because this is going to help you lay out the process, especially if you're designing a brand identity in a website, you need to make sure that you know what they actually offer as a business. You also need to know the USP, the unique selling proposition or point and what's the difference over the competitors; Why are they so different. What are they offering that's better than what's in the market? Then market positioning. How do they want to look? Premium, cheap, organic boutique. Where do they want to sit in the market? Do they want to sit in-between or on the far end? You got to talk about those things. Next is proper brand personality. We want to develop some keywords. There's a list that you can add to have on the side of just different words to spark imagery in the mind. Think about personality in regards of how the brand feels. Then tone of voice is how the brand talks, how the brand acts. Is it funny, formal, respectful, professional? Is it cooperates, playful? Tone of voice is important. Who are the competitors? List down some of the top competitors that they have. You don't have to make a list of 50, but five is fine to get the job done. Also talk about the target users and the actions they want to take; so demographics, psychographics. What do we want the consumers to think, feel, and do? What is the action that we want the customer to take when they interact with the brand or the website? Then next what you want to talk about is a project goals. What do you want to achieve in this identity or this campaign? What is the goal of this specific project? Are we trying to generate more leads to the website, are we trying to increase the sales by 50 percent? Are we just trying to bring brand awareness to this campaign we're developing or are we trying to educate or entertain? These are some examples of a project goal. Now lastly, you can talk about the history of the brand. Does the brand have any awards, honors, events or past accolades? Those things are really good. Visual references are great as well. If they can list down three or five brands they love, brand identities or band websites, what exactly they like about them. This can help you in your design phase when you're creating the brand or even the moodboard phase. Then design aesthetics. They could also be personality. Choose some keywords and adjectives in modern, playful, rustic, futuristic, edgy, things like that. When you use a whole bunch of different words, you can start to get pictures but you can make your own list and it's going help you out. Brand guidelines as well. Are there any brand assets or gardens we need to use? Maybe you're working with an agency or a brand that already has a logo in colors. Maybe you need to get the guidelines so you design in line with that. Next is creating parameters or requirements. These are things that's a must have. Maybe it's a brand color or heritage for example. Maybe it's McDonald's or something and you have to use the yellow for the arches of the M. That's one thing. Then lastly deliverable. What are you actually providing for the client? Is it a strategy? Is it a three concepts of a logo? Is it a flyer design? A brochure? Some business cards? List out the deliverables that you need. When you incorporate all these things you'll have a detailed brief that you can use to share with your team or share with yourself for a real client project or even a side project for yourself. It's going to give you the most information you need to tackle the project.
10. Let's make a Behance case study: I'm going to create a case study in Behance. I'm going to use a personal project that I was using for a YouTube video that I did a couple of weeks ago. It's a brand identity for a clothing brand. I want to use that to create a project on Behance. First, before we do that, I want to share with you all the sizing specs that you need when you create a portfolio with Behance. Behance is great. It's free, it's easy to use and upload your images. For the portfolio size, you have a width of 1,400 pixels and then basically the height is infinite. You can keep going down, so it's easy to scroll and I'll show you how to create that in Illustrator. Though project thumbnail size is a bit smaller, it's 808 pixels by 632 and that's the thumbnail that you see on your profile page when someone scrolls on the main page or when they click on it into your project, that is the little image there. Then I just want to mention a few file type things; so high resolution JPEGs is the way to go or transparent PNGs work best. This is for the best quality when uploading to Behance. Then GIFs for content doesn't work for covers. You can use it for content and little animations and stuff, but for your cover images, it doesn't work. Make sure the cover image is a nice mockup. Then lastly, to compress the images, if it's a bit slow or a bit chunky, then you want to compress them to a smaller file size, so tinypng.com is the way to go and that's the best in my opinion. Let's jump into Illustrator and I'm going to show you how to use Behance. I'm in Illustrator and this is the file that I had. I cleaned it up a little bit, but you can see here on my art board, and you can create this in Photoshop if you like or whatever platform, Figma, whatever app you use, but I typically use Illustrator and Photoshop. For this, I typically use Illustrator to build my images out. I'm going to press ''Shift O'', select the artboard, and you can see the sizing, this one's for the cover image, so 800 by 632 and then this is the project, the 1,400 by 4,000 in height, you can see here. With Behance, you can upload separate images or you can upload one long big image and I feel like that is better for me, personally. If your computer is laggy, it might be better just to do separate images and work on it separately. First up, let's start to make the cover image. I'm just going to start using just the elements we already had. I already made the project, but now I'm just grabbing some of the elements that I've built. I might grab some of these, I'm holding ''Alt'' to duplicate. I'm going to bring it to the front here, which is looking good. As you can see there. This is for an urban brand. I've got all the details here. This is going to be at the top here, but I'm just working on the [inaudible] for now. I think I'm going to grab this for the background here, it's a nice background element. I'm going to scale it down. I'm going to bring the background just like this. I think that's pretty cool. I might move this up. I'm really digging that. I think that's really cool. Let's see if we can add anything else, maybe like a mighty.com here in the corner. Just like that, cool. Now we'll leave that there, now, I'm going to work on the main project. Once again, I like putting a nice background image just like the color and for this I use black. I'm going to grab the project description. As we talked about with the case study, we want to talk about the project. I'm going to drag all this text and I'm going to use this width as my main layout. I can put guides if I want, maybe I want to press "Control R" and then drag out a guide. Now we've got a guideline, maybe we can use that. For text and stuff, that's totally fine. I can maybe drag another one out here if I want to do a grid. It's up to you, really, what you want to do. Mighty Clothing is an urban clothing label that inspires youth to, in the tough world we live in. The user, brand attributes or keywords. I'm keeping these very simple so you guys can create something. I can say role. Role, logo design, you can just say merch, Instagram profile design. I didn't do the landing page, I think I'll just leave that out. That is some stuff there. I can put the date as well. Let's just go 2021 and let's duplicate this. Obviously, I work pretty fast because I'm used to it, but if you're not it's all good. Let's say objective; launch new brand and get 50 sales within first week of launch. I'm just making this up. It's a site project and some of you are beginners, you might not have projects so I hopefully this gives you an idea of how to create a site project. What we can do here is start to add some elements from some of the Instagram shots that we did here, which I think is really cool. I did, for example, a mock-up, I can bring that into it, also to make sure that it fits nicely. I can try and blend, in Photoshop it would be easier to mask things and blend, but in Illustrator it works just as fine. We're going to track these things in. We can use the colors here. Then maybe I want to show it in an interesting way, like a shape or something. We can overlap things, you can overlap items and stuff. Then what I can do is, because I'm showing the RGB. This can take some time. I'm trying to do it as quickly as possible and then we're going to upload it really quick. I'm just using the fonts, everything we chose. Example, that's the hex code for that. Then for this one, copy and paste that in. Then we can do the RGB and stuff as well. You can write down though. I won't do it now, it'll take too long. I can maybe use that line like this. That's pretty dope. I'm using the motifs. I feel that's pretty cool. Let's try and get some more of these mockups. If I need to extend it, what I can do is press ''Shift O'' and drag it. Then just keep extending it. If I keep expanding and stuff, then I can keep moving that along. Put some of the merch there that I created. Put the logo here. Put this. Keep it in line with that. That's pretty dope. Let's see if we can incorporate some of this imagery. Think we're running out of space. Bring that up. Remove that. Pin that up there. Then let's try and bring some of these photography elements. Capacity. That was low. Do that. Spin that. Make it look interesting. Adding some of the cool messages, framework, and stuff. We can basically play around and make it really stand out and pop. See, if I had more mock-ups I could add more. But I feel, for now, maybe add the pattern there at the back. Make it white. Cool. We can maybe add some texture. I'm gonna go back to my textures. Let's see. Texture. Concrete. Let's add a concrete texture. Drag that in. What I like to do is, I usually like to make it a gray color. Cool. I'll drop the opacity down, and then I'll make a new layer. I'll drag it down to that layer. Cause I just want to make sure that it's the backgrounds and the bottom layer and then this texture. I can play around with it. Maybe I can duplicate it by pressing ''Control D''. You can see some of that texture. Maybe I can do the color. See how that looks. The color, maybe I want that green color, whatever it is. That's pretty cool. Maybe let's leave it the gray. Awesome. Once I'm happy with this, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go Control Shift E, which is my shortcut for export for screens. I'm going to save it as a PNG. Where's the artboards? There's this one and then this the long one. What I want to do, I want to export this now. You can go to file, you can go to export and save for web or export as. It's really up to you. I'm going to change it to JPEG. Ninety-five percent quality. That's fine. Very high. You can see it's three megabytes. what I'm going to do, I'm going to save this to my downloads folder, and I'll export the other one just as a PNG there. Hopefully, we selected the right one. Downloads. Okay. Now what you can do is, you can go to tiny PNG. To compress these images, I can drag and drop them and it's going to compress it down a little bit. Then you basically download. You can see this one's a bit bigger, so it takes a bit longer. Now, I want to go to Behance. In order for us to create a project, you want to click ''Create Project'' at the top right. Then now what I'm going to do is, I'm going to click ''Settings'' and I'm going to upload image. What I'm going to do is upload the cover image. See that? Obviously, I didn't name my files correctly, but make sure you name your files. This is the cover image. You can see what it's going to look like. It's fitting perfectly, which is great. Then what I'm going to do is click ''Crop''. Now we've got that cool image. We can call it Mighty Clothing. Now, what you want to do is add keywords, tags or brand identity, urban, clothing, merch, brand design, logo design, stuff like that. Then what you can do is click on ''Graphic Design Fashion''. We'll go to Photoshop. That's the wrong one. Adobe Illustrator, and then Photoshop. Boom. Visible to everyone. I can leave it on private if we want. Then no, it doesn't. I can go save draft. Whenever you want to edit the photo, you can always just go back to the right-hand side, click ''Settings'', and then you can edit that really easily. Now, all I have to do now, that image should be done, hopefully. Let me see. I'm going to download that. I'm going to call it Mighty Clothing Project. Okay, so now that we compressed it, now I'm going to double-click. Now it should load that whole image right in there. Boom. You can see that it's high-quality. Obviously, if you zoom right in and maybe a little bit pixelated. You can always save it at double the resolution and then it will be less compressed or less pixelated. We've got our main details there. Then you can start to scroll through and you can see everything's overlapping. It looks nice, all the texture's in there, all the design we did in Illustrator and that's it. Obviously, sometimes you can have a thank you slide. You can also edit and add images. If I want to insert an emoji or text, you can say, ''Thank you, checked out more at Jeremymura.com.'' But it'd be better for me to go into Illustrator, extend this upward, or add another slide and then add a thank you slide or your website. Then once that's done, basically, just save as draft. Obviously, if I go to my page, it might not show up. If I click ''Drafts'', you can see this is what it's going to look like. Last modified. You can click on it, and this is how it's going to look like. Appreciate it. Boom. High quality. Mock-ups look amazing. Boom, look at that. That's how you create a case study. Obviously, this was just a short side project, but remember, add as many details as you can. Expand upon it. You have so much power with Behance. It's really easy to use. But I hope this was helpful and I look forward to seeing your class project on how you create your first Behance portfolio piece.
11. Using Webflow Template: I want to show you how to set up a quick short portfolio site in Webflow. This isn't going to be an extensive course on how to create it from scratch because I want to have a separate course later down the track on how to use Webflow. But I want to show you how to use a quick template. Once you sign up for Webflow, it's free and it's free to actually build your site as a draft. Which is really cool, you can build two sites actually. You can go to Webflow templates. What you want to do is you going to click on "Free" and it's going to show you all these free ones here. But typically you want to start with the portfolio starter. I'm going to click on that. Then what I'm going to do is click "Use for Free". Then I'm going to call it My Portfolio and I'm just going to say Skillshare and I'm going to click "Create project". A project on Webflow is basically a website. It's going to load everything on that template for me. As I scroll down, you can see that it's got all the good stuff there, all the content and the text and everything there. Then on the left-hand side, I can press Z and that's going to open my Navigator so I can see everything. The way Webflow works is it's all in boxes so it's often called the box model. We've got sections. We've also got navigations, which are symbols in the illustrator. These are reusable across all pages so I can edit a symbol and I can change, powered by coffee or whatever made by Jeremy. I can leave those there. And if I click off it, it's basically if I go to a different page. To click on the pages, you click on the third thing. If I go to the About page, you can see the footer is still the same that we just changed. That's like a symbol. It's really cool. I'm just going to go back to the homepage. Obviously, we've got symbols at the first thing. The plus button is basically elements, containers and grids. But we're not going to go too much into detail on that. We've got Navigator, which I said before, stroke and easy to open that. We've got our boxes, our sections which are Divs. These all have classes. It's really cool. Then we got CMS and other little details there, we got the assets here, the images which we can leave. I'm just going to work with the front pages. For example, let's talk to like create this stuff here. Brand designer, Hey there, I'm Jeremy, Australia, beautiful. Now project one, project 2, you can see all these. It's all within the grid here. I can double-click. What I can actually do is I can actually link it to a page so I can get to one of the portfolio pages. I can make it when they click on it, go to a different section if I want, I can put my email. If they click on this will go to an email phone as well, which is really useful. Right now this is a link block. We've got a Div block and within that block or that box, where inside there is a link. This link will basically go to the page of the portfolio. What I'm going to do is, go to my class on the right-hand side and I can scroll down and you can see there's an image in the background section, images in gradient. You can see, I can turn off that image with the little eyeball. I can click on this image, I choose Image. I'm just going to drag some of my images here from the project we created before. As you can see there. That's really great. We've got the mock-up from the Mighty clothing. Then now if I click Preview, you can see these are links. If I click this, it's not going to go into it because I haven't sent it to the link. That's pretty cool. I'm just going to go back out of that. What you want to do, you want to make sure up the top you've got different views. You've got the mobile views, you got the iPad, but we're just going to focus on desktop view for now. Don't worry about mobile responsiveness. Because it's a portfolio template, it's already made it responsive anyways, you can see it all fits. But we want to make sure that we're working with this breakpoint here which means every change we make, it's going to affect all the other levels below it. I'm going to call this Mighty clothing. Let's go brand design. I'll leave the other projects as well. I'm just going to delete these two blocks here. The Div block, I'm going and deleting those. Now I've just got these two blocks here. For this one, I'm going to go and change the picture. Let me find another project that I've done. Let's type in case study. I'm just going to drag this one in. If an image is too big, it will tell you. All you got to do is basically drag it into this on to the Webflow browser and on the left-hand side you can see that little image icon is basically stored in assets file now. You can see that's that project there. I can go Macquarie University and go brand design. This is beautiful. Cool, I'm going to click on this link, I'm going to click on the little cog here. Then what I'm going to do is going to the second icon, which is a page. I'm going to choose the page and I want to go Project 1. I can make it go to the new tab if I want. I'll leave it on that. Then we'll click the eyeball and just test it real quick. Now I know it's going to page Project 1. On the top left you can see the pages. We've got the Homepage, About page, and then we've got a folder. Then within this folder, it's go all these project pages. We can add pages if you want, we can delete them, whatever. But we'll just going to quickly use this template. Mighty clothing, I'm just going to add the texts like we did for the Behance. I might get rid of that project overview. I'm going to copy and paste the texts from what we had from Behance. I'll go, my role, Instagram design, brand identity. That's pretty cool. What I'm going to do is click the little Cog, click Replace Image, and then start to add some of these images we already created. You can see here we can have some more texts. Maybe I don't want it in the middle, but I can just leave it there for now, replace this image. I can also double-click on the image and it's going to open that and I'm going to choose this one. Go back. Please make sure you want to click the image so it loads up. Once we work together, or let's chat. Book a call and let's get your brand moving. Cool, then I can go like, hello@jeremymura.com. This is a bit big so I can go on the right-hand side, you can see the font. I can change the font size, I can drop that. Let's go like 55. You can also change fonts as well, but I won't do it in this tutorial. Beautiful. We got our image there, I can click the little preview eye button to see what it's looking like. We've got our portfolio page. Scroll through, we got the basic information there. Then it got the mock-ups that we created. I haven't edited this text, but I can later on. Then we've got the image there looking really cool. If we want to change the background, we could make on this page, the color black, which will do this. That's an option as well. But you've got to basically invert all the text and make the texts wide, which can be tricky. Maybe I want to move one of these sections so you can see this section, is it by itself. Maybe I want to move it above the other image. You can see on the left-hand side how I'm dragging it. Now I brought it up here now all the images are like this. Really just simple, connected together. We've got one section there, we've got another section there and another section here which was made which is really cool. I can also add spacing. If I want to add padding here, we can go to spacing on the left right hand side, and you can add some padding. It's going to add some space at the bottom if you want, or we could just leave that. We didn't even have to have multiple sections. We can actually leave things, move it around, but we're just going to leave that for now. I might put some more texts, I'm just going to copy and drop some. I would just delete this and this. I think that is looking good. We can spend more time on it and we can make it really good. But I think I'm just going to leave it there just to keep it really simple. But the more images, the more mock-ups and you can add more detail of the problem, the challenge, all that stuff. But what you want to do is you want to go to publish, and then you can publish to selected site. Because there's no domain connected to this site, I'm just going to publish to the webflow.io. Then what you can do is you just click this little icon here, and that's going to take you to the actual working website. Now you can see, I can see the portfolio page and I can share this link with someone else if I want. I can click on the logo to take me to the homepage which we just created as you can see there. Obviously, we didn't edit any of this. But it's just a quick way to start to do your website and that's just in Webflow. You can use the other sites I've mentioned before, but hopefully that shows you a quick way on how to use Webflow.
12. Portfolio Reviews: Let's jump into it. But before we do, I just want to quickly say that I always try and give constructive criticism or feedback. Whenever I say something that sounds harsh or negative, don't take it personally. Remember, we're trying to be objective here for your portfolio to just make it better so you can actually get more clients and improve upon your work. I try and say things that are practical and I'll give as many tips as I can. I'll probably have two separate videos, so it doesn't go too long because I've got a fair few students to go through. But let's just jump into it. Remember, pay attention to things that I say to other students because it might be relevant to you as well. Let's jump into it. First up, we've got Taha Ahmed. On his Behance account, he's got three projects. He's fairly new. The one that stands out to me is this red one, the cover image. I just like the white mockups here and the middle one. This one is not that stand out because the white background doesn't really work and it's not popping for me. Try and avoid white backgrounds. Try and keep it into a nice mockup. Remember, visual mockups really make an impact. I'm going to click on this one, Surge Energy case study. Let's just quickly go through this. First up, so this mockup is interesting. I like how the elements are like a wild contrast with the background. Then you've got Surge Energy on a can here. The thing is this is disconnected. It's like is it a bear? Should this be at the front of something? Because some of these elements now feel irrelevant. Maybe this should be the main thing put in the center here or something. Rejuvenation a real factor. Then he carries into talking about the goal, hypothetical project on merchandising a brand. You don't have to say hypothetical, guys. You don't have to say it's a fake project. People don't have to know. You just treat it like a normal project, like if it was a real client, so people didn't have to see that or guess. It's not lying. It's just like it's not important. The work is important, the goal and achieving results. It's a decaffeinated energy drinks and gels, Surge Energy. It's good. He's breaking down the goal. He mentions the audience, the key components. That's pretty cool. It's good. It's okay that he mentions the ingredients, but I think it's probably not as relevant. If it's connected to the brand story and that you can tell it in a good way, then that's going to be good. Client aim, that's cool. The compelling event. It's cool he's bringing a bit of texts. I think it's a bit too much texts, maybe cut it down to one paragraph. This is his mood board, interesting layout, interesting choice of images. You've got a lot of this lightening action going. Pretty decent. It feels a sporty dynamic type of thing. That's cool. The gap and the rollout. He's starting to mention some of the parts of that which is cool. Then on to sketches. When showing sketches, it's nicer to put it on a mockup, it just looks better. This image is also blurry as well. Maybe scan it into your printer or just use your camera instead of your phone. But I do like how he put sketches, that's pretty cool. The design is decent. It's a nice logo mark. Final design. Surge Energy, color palette. I just feel like just having it on a white background, there's not that much going on and I feel it's a bit lazy just laying things out like this. This is just a screenshot of CMYK, which is not too bad, but I feel you can portray it and display it way better. Even the typeface selections have a type specimen layout showing the font in action in a bit more, instead of just showing the logo. He's got, here I will be illustrating the impact of the work of the gain. You could probably say benefits or solution, that probably makes more sense than having the gain there. The mockups. I'm not sure if this is the actual powder or is it coffee. Is that what's actually in the bottle? I think an energy drink doesn't get drunk in a mug unless it's a powdered version. Maybe if it's true, if that's what it is, then that's fine. T-shirt, a tote bag. That's all right. Then a showing of different bottles. Showing it on a random two separate bottles, that doesn't make sense. Obviously a solution would have been to choose one bottle. Why are they showing two different types? This could be better. The background colors, I don't know why it's blue. That's not part of the brand colors. That's another thing that doesn't make sense. Just putting it to the red or the gray or having a secondary color. That goes back to the color palette. You only have two colors. Try and expand upon the brand color palette. Try and have 4-5 colors, some that are secondary, which you don't use as much, and then some that are the two main ones. Let's go through. That's cool. Try and add also other details like it's just the logo, is there a pattern illustration? Is there other imagery? Because it's just a logo. Obviously on a package, it's way more, so trying to figure out other information you can put on the work. The summary, the mission, the outcome, the impact. This is cool. I reckon you could have probably put this at the top and cut out half the other information because this looks more important, like a summary, it's a breakdown. People don't read much on portfolios. Hands on rejuvenation. That mockup is decent. On a poster, you probably wouldn't have that image there for an ad. You probably could have just left this and then played around with the text more. But overall, I think that's probably your best one. I quickly glanced through the other one. The logo designs are fine. It's just like presenting it better and just making things more relevant and not having too many colors. Keep within the brand. Let's jump onto Olumide. I don't know how to say his name. Sorry if I butchered it. He's a student as well. He looks like he's a beginner by quickly glancing at the images here. I can see this is a flyer, a couple of logos. But once again, having the white background, I don't think it works. It doesn't make it stand out. Use the brand colors or put it on a mockup. It's going to look way more better instead of just showing a logo like this. He's got a couple of logos. The inconsistency with the flyers and the logos here, this is a bad style. These two logos are a bit different to this, and then this is not even a logo. Try and stick with the theme, just put all logos, use the brand colors. I'm just going to click on the first one here, the NIKEP Ventures. He's just showing a logo by itself. There's no content, there's no contexts. You should be showing something of what the brand name is, what's the goal, what's the problem you're solving and how did you approach the design, what's the process? Instead of just showing a logo because that's going to be effective. Also, the topography could be improved here. I feel always customize the font. I can see you tried to customize it here. But it becomes imbalanced. Always try and look for fonts. Then here you can see if I zoom into this logo, you can see how the whitespace, it's too small. At small sizes you won't be able to see it. Try and use similar spacing. Maybe use this stroke of the white here and put it there. I like the badge one. Let's see what's this one is about. Dillon and Samuel trial attorneys. This logo is very detailed. The outside feels like Clip Art and same as the eagle, so it needs to be simplified. A logo should always be very simple. Simplify it and the colors, just the contrast feels a bit off. Try and always stick with simple shapes instead of having little shapes. Because at small sizes you won't be able to see any detail. Just showing all these logos here. Just showing logos don't work like that. Remember, try and expand quick case studies, it's going to be better for you. Next one, Namudi. She's from India. She seems very friendly. Let's check out her work. I don't know if she's a graphic designer. It looks like she does textiles or art, something like that. I'm going to scroll through here. Straight away I can see she's very crafty or artsy. This is a lot of illustrations. This is pretty cool watercolor illustrations. But I'm not getting a feel for a specific style. They're just random images. This is random. You've got quotes. Then you've got lettering stuff. But I feel her style is more doodling and water illustration. Try and have a consistent grid. A grid is the top nine posts, because right now it's inconsistent, you're having too many images that don't speak to your craft. Try and stick to one style instead of just doing all these random things. If it's the illustration stuff, I think stick with that because you look very strong in that. Instead of doing a screenshot, try and maybe scan it in and put it on a mockup or just put a nice texture on the background. That could be an idea. I think that's it. I don't think she has a portfolio om the website. I checked it out before. Next one, Antonio Salazar. He looks like a designer. I'm going to just quickly scroll through. This looks interesting. Looks like a bit of digital art, cinema magic. That looks an App. Burger Bot, that look like an app as well some some packaging. Santa Cruz, energy drink. Cool. Straight away I can tell he's a bit of a UI designer, a bit of a digital artist. I would probably cut down your portfolio top four pieces, some of these older pieces don't look as enticing to me. These look like student projects here. As you can see, here you did a magazine for a school or something. I feel you probably don't need that. This is good to have consistency. I like these, mock-ups are decent with the UI that's interesting. Then you've got this one, which is like a poster design. I think I want to go to the cinema magic one and quickly look through that. Cinema magic. Right off the bat, there's no texts. I don't know what this is for. Is it for a cinema-like or an online app? What is it for? Have some contexts, have the texts, remember on the problem, the business name, the solution, etc. Sketches are cool. Sometimes sketches are not the best to show. You can actually use low-fidelity UI mock-ups, this's probably better. Because sometimes it's hard to make sense of what it's like, which runs screen 1, is it this one? Is it this one? The flow, it's a bit hard to tell. Everything is white. The arrows and the icons, it's a bit hard to tell. Maybe I'll tighten that up a bit. This mock-up looks cool. I like how the screens are laid out. It's dynamic. I feel like these little glowing orbs take away from the screens. I think it's a bit too much detail, but the background gradient is nice and the blows and stuff. But remember, try and simplify, try and focus on the screen design, the stuff that you've done. I can tell obviously needs a bit of a fireman with the fonts and stuff like that. But it's a good first start. This is a nice mock-up. I like having stuff like this, isometric view with the phone mock-ups, clearly showing the product. That's decent. This one is decent. I feel like some of the same screens are showing. If you've already shared a screen, is there a point showing it again in a different view? That's just redundant. Maybe think of showing the digital logo or maybe it can be a phone mock-up. Maybe have a person to show the audience there holding the screen or something. I don't know. Think of things like that. You've put the text at the bottom, this should probably be at the top. When I hit the page, this is what I'm saying, that makes sense. What I'll do, I would update some of these images because these two here, they don't really speak to me. They're not standing out. The fonts and the colors, try and stick it, keep it cohesive with the brand. Don't just do random stuff. That's interesting, the bottle. I love how the bottles with the background and it's dynamic. It's cool, you've got these spot and pattern. Can you use that in the background? Can you use that on other elements? Instead of just keep showing the bottle, because you're just showing the bottle. But it might be better to show other things like where's the messaging? Maybe the logo by itself. Then put the text up to the top. Don't say about, say the project name, like Spartan Ale re-design or Spartan Ale drinks or case study. Obviously, you got to hear about, you could just take that out and bring the text at the top, so hope that help them. Newzealand.com. Here's a graphic designer. At first glance, I can tell this website feels like it's a WordPress website. There's too much space here, so you can see if I just quickly get this big. I'm just trying to get my pen out so I can, I don't have it. There's too much spacing here. Feels weird. Then the font feels weird compared to your logo. It's very fun and like script. These could be different fonts. There's a lot of whites, meet Chris. Instead of focusing around yourself, say, let's start a project. Focus on the call-to-action, start a project, get in touch. Let's book a call. Have that instead and have this on the left-hand side, so it's aligned. I think that's better. Always in motion. This doesn't make sense. Are you a motion designer? Try and focus on the customer. The brand identity and logo design. You can probably cut that out and maybe put an image on the right side or behind in the background, to show some of the designs. I can see, we can click on one of those things, it's going to take us through his portfolio. Cool. Changing world of design and print. I don't know if this is a blog, if you put your blog here. Logo design print. This is a lot of texts, lot of things happening. I think just simplify it and just focus on the work here. You can see his work. There's a whole mix of stuff here. I can see this looks like old work. I'd probably get rid of it and just cut down to your top eight. Some of these digital art stuff, I'd probably just focus on the Logos for now, because they just look professional. I like this one stands out to me because that is the contrast of the background. Let's just take this one and see how he laid it out. Shortstop brand, logo concept, deliver whatever you want, whenever you want. There's no context of the project or the case study there, so let's scroll down. You got it here, that's fine. It's cool to have a header. I don't like the gray here. If there's a way you can change the background with the same color as this background that would just flow better, a lot better. Texts, it's good to have sub-headings as well like under the brand name or case study, goal, problem, etc. It just gives more scalability, readability on your page. Now let's go down. You can see some of the logos. Showing the logo like that flat it just doesn't look as good. Try and put on a mock-up like this. This looks decent. I feel like though it would be better to show on a side version like a site on the side of the van because this is hard to see. It's very small, whereas the side, it's more bigger and you can blow it up. Let's go down, graphic design and Logo Clearspace. I can see you're showing the clear-space, that's usually part of the brand guideline. I don't know if it really works by itself like this. If you had a case study scrolling or down with images and you might be more relevant. Yeah, I think keep all this information to your style guide or brand guide or the logo. Because this is irrelevant to someone who's a client is looking at this. To you it is, but I'll probably cut this out and try and maybe do just a nice mock-up, full width of just the main logo with nice guidelines. The dotted lines, I think dashes look better as well. But that's subjective, it's my opinion. This mock-up looks nicer compared to the other one. This should probably be at the top. That will look nice and maybe put the background green that will really pop and stand out. Scrolling down, vehicle designs. Instead of having graphic design company logo, say vehicle designs and stationary. Try and put the heading of what is the main thing that you've done at the design. Obviously I can see the mock-ups. These mockups are decent. I can really see the brand coming through them. I don't see any brand messaging that should be some key messaging that you've created. You've got London-based company just cut that out. Just put uniform design or merch design. Just put that. So we can see. Obviously, I see it's a lot of a logo stuff. There's a bit of text here. I can start to see some things. You've got Loren Ipsum. Try and get rid of Loren ipsum just to make it feel more like a real project. Try and come up with some texts or even sometimes you can go on a company with another similar website and just copy the text that's similar. It's going to be a lot better. I can see this mock-up. Always try and customize it so it doesn't feel like it just a stock mock-up you've got. I need to see more of the brand elements here, like the business cards and even the background, maybe add that bluish color or the green. Some of these mock-ups are decent but just need to reform and you need to work on it. Next one is from Sherie D. Welsford Art and Design. The logo is very big on this page. Make it very small and then bring these things up. I can see you are into maybe pottery and art, which is cool working progress, photography and artwork. I would have two separate sites. One for your art and one for design. I'm just going to focus on design here. I can see you got a blog about me and work, that's fine. Text is simple. I'm going to click on "Design". I can just see one project. Maybe there's more. There is, I just scrolled down. I think try and have separate blocks so someone can select, this is label design, this is brand design etc, because if they have to scroll all the way, it's like, is this one project? Is this all the same? I'm not sure. It gets confusing, so try and simplify it. Have separate blocks or a grade or a gallery that you can use. So Project 1, I would get rid of this. It feels like a student project. Maybe cut that out and talk about the name of the project. Instead of calling illustration, call it something that's relevant to this, like coffee shop brand. I don't know. Try and call it with a cool name. I like how you've got goal here and client, that's good. This is really great. You talk about the goal. Visitors get a free copy. This is great. This is awesome. People want to create a work from home guide for potential customers. The goal is to tap into the increasing trend. So you should say e-book cover design or e-book design, whatever that is. This is short, I like how it's short and sweet. This image is very big compared to the text. Maybe put the texts above it. I don't know. I feel like this grid could be improved. The layout, there's little whitespace, it just feels weird, unbalanced, so maybe lift this up and make this a bit tighter and smaller and maybe put it on an e-book mockup, that would work as well. Planning stage. I'm not sure if this is the same project. These images, this one looks a bit low quality, pixelated. I don't know if you just copy and pasted it from somewhere or you did that. I'm not sure if we're still on the same project. It just feels different. Maybe it is your coffee images there. It feels like clip art. Try and avoid clip art. Just leave the free sites out there. Even if you can copy images from Pexels, Unsplash online, dribble, things like that. You're not copying it, it's just like inspiration. I can see the colors though. The colors are not used in this. I don't know, there's disconnection there. You've got sketches. These sketches look very clean, very neat. I like that. Maybe put it on a paper page or a notebook mockup. That'll be nicer. Notes and sketches and moodboard. These things are very cramped and hard to read. I think try and have a similar like this and see these tests as all the texts should never go above 70 percent, 80 percent on the page. It should be this short basically. As short as this. It shouldn't keep going because your brain gets overwhelmed and they don't want to read it. Deliverables. It's a decent mock-up. It's just pixelated. I don't know if you can see it, but it is pixelated. Work on saving high-quality images. [inaudible] mockups, decent, maybe some brand colors in the background observe as having white thoughts in the cut. This is probably what's on the website. Try and put that, show that on the customer's website, do a screenshot and then have a mock-up of a web frame on a MacBook or a laptop and then show the page there, the top of the page with the center instead of just putting it like this. This feels weird like it's floating. But obviously I can tell that's the design that you've created on the banner on the website. Digital layout. I feel like the layout could be worked. But it's good. See, I like how you did the MacBook Pro. So you've chosen a similar thing for this. Did the website there, brand identity. You've got another website. This is good, this is a bit better. Deflect these images, it's too big. Just work on that. I like the word, this is word mappings, that's good. Just try not to have a pixelated. I like how you are extracting words in collage. This is nice. This is better than the previous one. Follow design color palette. This logo, the font choice can be better and the contrast between restaurant and rainforest can be better. You can probably even take out restaurant, but I think more context, the logo needs to be simplified. I can see different colors and strokes and stuff. Whenever you create a logo, keep it simple. You're breaking down. That's cool. Staff uniform, marketing. I just feel like try and show a better mock-ups. There's the free mock-ups out there, so try and keep it relevant to the project. Stick with the brand colors, keep it consistent, keep the images as high-quality as you can. I think that would be better to everyone on his work, but it's a good start. We're back with some more portfolio reviews. This one is from Sue Mason or Suzanne. It looks like she does Art and Design. At first glance, I love her. Your illustration style. I think this is really amazing. Love the cover images. They really stand out. They've got the grit, the texture. I just love the patterns and textiles, paintings, illustrated maps, cool. It's really clear that you've got a certain style that it's consistent. I like that. Even with the font choice, I think that's really good. There's a lot of text here. Try and shorten it and try not to let texts go more than 70 percent or 60 percent on the halfway of the page. Try and keep it on the left like stacked instead of like going all the way like that. Maybe have a photo of yourself as well. I think that's important. At first glance, I can see you've got paintings, patterns, picture books. I like your illustration. I'm going to click on that. See where that takes me. Please contact me if you are interested in licensing my work. Cool. You've got a whole bunch of different stuff. Greeting cards, bees, picture books. We'll pick picture books. Is it going to show me specific stuff? Sweet. I can see your portfolio. The consistency is there, I really love that. I love this grid, very simple. I like the little hover effect as well. Shows me that I can actually click on it. If I click on it, what happens? It's just a simple grid. It would probably be good to see if you've done any stuff work for brands or any commercial stuff and put it within the case study. But I feel like if you're going to illustrate out, like having a portfolio like this is okay. It works. You can see the style. But maybe if you had a certain project where you did a full book, maybe try and show that in a case study, that will probably be nicer. Overall, I think it's really cool. Let me go to just try and get the patterns. I think this side design is really clean, really simple. I don't know what this banner is with the Dropbox there. That drop shadow looks weird, doesn't look too friendly. The Spanish gardens, let's click on that one. Cool. I think it's just going to show me good. I think it's nice, I think your portfolio is cool. I think maybe trying to show some of the textiles or pictures, I don't know if you've seen like an Etsy store where they have the pillows and phone covers and stuff, try and put some of those mockups in it, I think it would really make it stand out. Let me just go back there. I think it would really make it stand out, like put it on a physical object that people can see it in their living room or on a home décor. But if you want to focus more on commercial work then focus on trying to put it within the case study and expand upon it, like try to acquire the goal and the project and the brand. But overall your style is really cool, I think you've done a lot of effort. We could have some more pictures of you, maybe your workspace, your art space. People love that, that's really inspiring to people so maybe share some of that. Let's jump into Bridget. She has a Instagram, she's a photographer and illustrator. One of the things she talked about was a bit of both. I'll always say have separate pages. One for illustration, one for photography. I can really see your photography here, a lot of floral elements, sunsets, late nights, top of vibes here. I can see you've got some text, just breathe. I don't think you need that. Secondly for Instagram, you see how your images have the black bars. Just do a one-to-one ratio. I know it's landscape, you're trying to show it wide but just crop it and have that one-to-one ratio, it looks way better. 1350 pixels by 1080, or you can just do 1080 by 1080. I'm not a specialist in photography myself. I do have experience in it and I've done it before, but overall I can see the consistency. Try and color grade your images to have similar vibes. Like you can see this has a nice bluey tone to it whereas others it's very warm. Maybe come up with the filter that's consistent. A one filter or blue to make things pop. But I really do like nature, it looks interesting but I think if you look up Peter McKinnon and there's some other photographers I follow, they have a consistent grid, try and have that vibe. If I go to your website, I can see you've got pix and stones, try and simplify the logo. It looks very detailed and it looks like a clip art, I'm not sure where you got that from. Try and avoid drop shadows like this, it just doesn't look good, just keep it simple. I can see you're trying to promote your Instagram there which is fine. I can see straight away you got photography, I feel like I need a bit more information. I obviously don't like having the week span out like try and pay for that. It doesn't look professional, it doesn't look good when you have a banner there saying four weeks. Let me just click on artwork. Photos Bridget art words. Cool, that's a cool illustration, I like the paintbrush there. There's not really much I can click on unless I have to go to a menu having to like click multiple times is not a good sign for user experience, try and keep it simple. Lest we forget I can see the ID you've got in there, that's pretty interesting, cool ideas. I just need context, I feel like it's just art. If you want to do more commercial work try and, I feel like try and develop a consistent style. Feels like it could be in some children's kids books or something like that. This is an interesting pattern. Once again, as I said previously, like try and show it on textiles like couches or fabrics. I'm trying to add that texture in there like pillows and décor, try and add your elements on a nice mockup. I think that really works. But I feel like photography now but try and have two separate websites. It's pretty inexpensive to have a website hosting on Wix is pretty cheap. If I just go to about page, back on my photo that's all right. It doesn't match your photography, that your photography is very vibrant and colorful and you've got black and white. Obviously you might be shy but like add your personality, add a bit of text, talk a bit about yourself or your goals or something like that. I think that's really going to help but yeah. Next up we've got Arif Hossain. First I want to land on your site,.myportfolio.com. I would just go straight to your work. Don't go to about page because you're focusing on yourself. It's being more self-centered. Whereas you want to focus on clients. I'm from Bangladesh, after working several years at Upwork as a VA, I've decided to explore my journey during my learning path. This gray gradient, I think get rid of it, just keep it white the background. Try and make it personal like I say "Hey", or something. "Hey, I'm Arif", try and make it more friendly personal. This image is very big, a bit of a low quality image. Try and get a portrait shot, have a nice portrait, get your friend who has a camera or maybe you have a camera I don't know. Let's go back to the work. "Hi, I'm Arif." Take out the image of the back, that doesn't work. Try and focus on the client, so if you want design work say, I help tech companies launch say startup with UI design, something like that. Get rid of this as well. Find rid of social links, like make it client-focused, talk about how you help them or what you do. I'm a UI/UX designer for small startups in Bangladesh or wherever the location is. Scroll down, I don't like the image in the back, get rid of that. Why? It's distracting. We want to focus on the projects in the mockups. I think this one stands out the most. See this mockup that's nice, this one is all right. I can see your face there. Your face is angry, learn to smile in. I can see that this one is a bit too detailed for the cover image, these ones are white as well. Try and add the brand colors in the background and have a great backgrounds. Let's just jump into this one, the top, so sometimes when you're centering text like this, it doesn't look good, it's harder to read. Left align the text, all the texts, left align and maybe put it on the left-hand side. The background color, I don't know if it's part of the brand color, it doesn't look like it because I can see dark light jade green and then navy colors. Also maybe just make sure the headings are relevant. You can go to the heading twice, that's pointless so cut that out. Cut these out the black, it doesn't look good. I guess just keep it white. If you have a colored background, if it's white background use black. Then also as part of my assignment I've created four landing pages for A/B testing. Try and give a bit more context. Just say the challenge was to create a landing page for a logistics company and we did a test to see which was more effective and then talk about the solution. We ended up having the darker mode more successful, whatever. Please let me know what you like most. Get rid of that question. If a client is coming on here or you want to get hired for a job that's you're trying to get your reviews, you're trying to get a client. You can say need help with your logistics project and maybe put it at the bottom. Let's scroll through here, requirements. Put all this stuff at the top, I think that's more relevant. Don't talk about the mockup, just cut that out. Cut this out, project four assignment, you don't have to say that. A live version, cool. It's pretty clean, pretty nice there's too much spacing here, the title there. Try and avoid lowering Ipsum, try and put your in text. But it's a standard website design, it's pretty clean, that's fine. You can share the whole page, try and maybe show it on a mockup. Have mockup screens, I think that's nice to show like that through the whole landing page. But it's pretty clean, pretty good. Then you have the dark version. I'd like to see more mockups just so people can visualize the website features. These features for more details [inaudible] contact. You need to have a call to action. What do you want the person to do off this? You want them to get on a call with you? You want them to email you? Because these things are irrelevant to this. I can see it's a student project, that's all right, you said it's your assignment, I think I understand that. But this might not be relevant to someone who's looking at your portfolio. Try another professional email like you can buy an email from Google for five bucks a month, it's not that expensive. It looks more professional and try and have your name, set of words just yeah, been professional. Contact is fine, keep the social stuff into the folder. This is hard to see and read that stuff, so get rid of this. The feedback, once again, get rid of that. Maybe this is your class project, you submit it to your teacher I don't know, but to me try and keep it relevant to getting jobs in freelance work. This is similar as well. Just try and show more visual mock-ups instead of showing the whole page because they've got to scroll through, its very long. Try and share your working what's your process, how you created it from scratch, and for me sketches to the UI mocks to delivery. But overall, it's a good start and I hope that helps.
13. 12 Next Steps + Thank you: Thanks so much for taking this class. I hope that you now have an understanding of how to create a portfolio or a case study that can really boost your work and make you stand out so you can get more clients, get more work, and be confident in your design ability. I really appreciate it if you can do your class project, all the details are in the project section. You can go down and click that on the Skillshare platform and there'll be a template and also a PDF where you can download. Make sure you do apply yourself and try and create a concept project. It can be from a past client or it can just be a client you made up and make that case study upload it to be hands, and I will be selecting one winner and they will win a one-year premium membership on Skillshare, which usually cost over a $100, so you get a whole year for free. Do that before the 30th of September to be in the running to win that, and I'll select the best design and case study. Remember, you need to share your work, put your work out there and start creating amazing portfolio that can get you seen. Make sure you put in the effort and do your best, and I'm sure you'll grow as a designer. Thanks so much for watching. I really appreciate it if you also click the follow button on Skillshare so you can get informed on all my new updates and new classes that are coming out this year and in the future. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much See you next time.