Creating a digital portfolio - dos and don'ts

This article goes through some of the basic things you should do when creating your digital portfolio for art and design degree and diploma courses including architecture. The article focuses on the practical requirements of putting your work into a digital portfolio to submit to universities online instead of a physical folder that you take along to an interview in person or send in the post.

The author has worked in admissions and admissions related roles in UK universities for over 20 years including at both Russell Group universities with an art school and at a specialist Art University.

The best portfolios are your own website or blog (or hosted on there). Wordpress, wix and tumblr offer a wide range of flexibility in presenting your work (and you can use tags and categories to structure your work into different portfolios for each of your choices). There's also a lot of flexibility available on sites like flickr and behance to create albums with your portfolio in if you don't want to use a blog. If you're studying a creative degree then developing your personal online portfolio is something you will be expected to do throughout your course and your career after graduating so it's worth starting now!

If you're restricted by your exam boards on posting your work publicly then speak to your teachers about whether there is anything you can do to work around that (adding date/copyright stamps for example). In this case your best option will be to create each of your portfolios as a powerpoint or google slides slideshow. Choose a large size slide so that you can post your work and some accompanying commentary/information. Once you're happy then save your slideshow as a pdf to reduce the file size. That pdf can then be emailed or submitted online or hosted in your google or onedrive documents and a shareable link created to send to your universities.

DO

• Take photographs of your work while you're working on it (and store them somewhere safe and accessible from home and school) so you don't end up without access to your own work
• Be prepared - start putting together plans for different portfolios and a platform to share your work well in advance so you have time to add in any extra work and meet any deadlines without panic
• Read the portfolio guidelines for each university/course
• Create a custom portfolio for each university/course
• Put your full name, UCAS ID, University ID, Course applied for and the name of the university (get it right - check on their website!) on the header/title slide of your portfolio. If you're sending a pdf file then put your name and UCAS ID in the filename and your contact details in the metadata too.
• Put your best work first (and last)
• Include information about each work (media, title, brief it was responding to)
• Include content warnings for any explicit or violent work - staff may be looking at your work in a shared office! Some sites will restrict sharing of explicit or violent work (sometimes even just life drawing gets censored) so if your portfolio contains work of this nature you might need to use a different platform or media to share your work
• If you're grouping work by theme then explain that - use subheading slides/albums
• Include development work from your sketchbook (for at least one piece of work many universities will ask for more)
• Include general sketch work from your sketchbook
• Keep to any rules on length

DON'T

• Order your work chronologically - this is a portfolio not a CV
• Include work that isn't yours without making that clear (that includes using AI). If you've used references or AI to generate work then you need to make it clear where you've taken inspiration from and what is uniquely your work.
• Get the name of the university wrong in the header/title slide
• Put a headshot or selfie on the first slide - it's just weird
• Include huge sized files - staff will be looking at your images on a computer screen and wont be zooming in. Compress your images as much as is reasonable
• Send in a portfolio containing almost everything you've ever done - staff will be looking through your portfolio quickly, if you send through 100 images/slides when they've asked for 10 or 20 then you are making it clear that you can't follow instructions
• Dump image files in a google/one drive folder and send through a link to the folder - your portfolio should present your work not expect staff to click in and out of random image files with no explanations
• Ignore the technical requirements of the portfolio guidelines - if they need you to upload your images to pebblepad, or create your portfolio as a slideshow and send it through as a pdf then do as you've been asked. Similarly if they've asked for a single link added to their portal then don't email through multiple links or files. If you don't understand the technical requirements then don't guess - ask the university directly.
• Share editable files with your universities. They don't want to make edits they only need to view your portfolio. Don't risk a member of university staff accidentally deleting something important!

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