Portfolio overview

So we finished what we came here to do. We reached out and contacted our client, Grimur demonstrated his falsetto voice impersonated our client, we connected with them and stepped them through the whole process. We added value to their business. So how do we add this work, our completed work to the portfolio. More important to this intro video what’s the goal of a portfolio? Let’s cover that. In fact, imagine for a moment that we started with the portfolio. Imagine it was the first step and not the last. A lot of people think their body of work needs to be perfect. We’re often pretty self-critical of the work we’ve done and that gets in the way. It gets in the way of the work we want to do. Regardless of the reason for making a portfolio, a lot of people do this, they make a portfolio to try and squeeze into a specific job position. They shift their focus because they think there’s a particular kind of portfolio, a particular kind of client, wants to see and that’s challenging. It’s particularly challenging when starting out, or growing a freelancing business or an agency because we often want to pad our portfolio. We add every last internship and every last project and we do this because, when we’re starting out, it’s better than nothing. But there’s something to consider here and we hinted at this all the way back at the beginning of the course. What happens when we base our portfolio on work we happened to do in the past and not what we wanted to do in the future. Think about what this does over time. Let’s say we want to get into freelance photography but our portfolio is full of illustration work. Maybe it’s good illustration work, but a portfolio that has illustration work is likely to attract more illustration work. If we demonstrate value, if we establish or communicate to a potential client that trust or authority regarding photography, we could get a client, it might be for very little pay at first, but now we can feature the kind of photography we love to do. We’re choosing clients based on the work we want and not based what we happened to have done in some point in the past. That’s the key. To make a portfolio, to do that of work, sometimes we can’t get that first client. Or that right client and sometimes that means doing our own work, and photography, that means featuring our own photography. In web-design it can mean doing a redesign of a website, or a redesign of an app, a layout, even a logo. You can establish that trust or authority without previous work experience in that specific field you want to grow in. When you do a redesign, or when you do original work for yourself, you’re choosing your own client here and you’re demonstrating your value to potential clients. That’s another really clear thing that serves as a deliverable. If our goal is to convey trust and authority we can also start writing. We can ask around, do a guest blog post on someone else’s blog, we can start our own blog, we can get a talk on a subject, we can record it, post it online, create a youtube channel, and regardless of the work we’ve done, sometimes character references mean a great deal. You can ask people you’ve worked with to provide testimonials and for testimonials or reviews, you are essentially getting character references. People supporting your reliability. Remember, a portfolio doesn’t have to be a body of work. It can be something about you. A goal of a portfolio is to communicate trust and authority. These are just a handful of options. Any one of these, even if it’s early in your journey of whatever we are supposed to call the phase that sits right next to the other phase where you decide to start doing freelancing in the first place, any one of these is fine. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Again, most people get stuck at the portfolio. Our primary objective is to have a portfolio that features or talks about the kind of work we want to do and establishes both trust and authority regarding that work. So in this section we’ll go in more detail but that’s an overview of some of the things that make up a portfolio.