There are two main factors to consider while planning your art portfolio.
Content is the most important factor. As straightforward as saying that the Art comes first, careful content consideration is indispensable to show your art at its best. Complement the presentation of your visual samples with information about you, your practice and your career. Good Visuals and useful relevant information will encourage the appreciation of your work.
Second factor is Form. Whatever the format, it should be easy to review, facilitate access to the content and be a discreet channel to the Art. Plio Art Portfolio has been specially designed for the Visual Arts context. This elegant and easy to use solution puts at your fingertips all the advantages of the Web 2.0 letting you publish and organize all your content in a simple way.
Both these factors are essential to the achievement of an eloquent art portfolio. We’ll discuss different issues related to form in step: Keep Up With Trends Using Plio.
For now, let’s focus on the content.
The main part of an art portfolio’s content is the Visual Samples, which represent your creations as an artist.
Once you get a hold of the simplicity and ease of use of the Plio Art Portfolio, you’ll be able to tweak and make your portfolio evolve. So, start with a scope that seems reasonable to you and avoid putting yourself under the pressure of preparing a lot of content at once. Remember that digital files need to be optimized for the Web. Don’t worry if you are unfamiliar with these processes, we’ll come back to this later on.
For now, let’s draw the blueprint of your portfolio.
Stage 1: Plan your Content
Let’s define the content first, and then gather the images and texts. Here are some considerations to keep in mind while planning your art portfolio.
- Identify the purpose of the art portfolio.
Knowing your target audience and desired outcome can help you make consistent decisions while planning and building your portfolio.
- Define the collections or groups that will organize your artworks.
Make a list or draw a scheme of your collections, think about the best order and arrangement. Remember that you can nest collections; this means that you can group collections within collections.
- Keep in mind a main thread or theme: you’ve seen other artists organize their work by project, date, technique or else. Ask yourself what makes sense to you. Group your artworks into collections according to a chosen logic. Selected works should support and reinforce each other in order to communicate a consistent practice.
- Start small and develop over time: limit your initial scope to just a few image collections. You can continue to develop your portfolio by adding collections as you go along. This relieves you from the pressure of preparing a lot of content at once.
- For each collection, make a list of the works it contains.
Make these lists in a way that allows you to add information. You might do them on your computer or on a piece of paper. Both are fine.
- A careful selection is key: Choose your best artworks or those that are best suited for your purpose. Avoid including works that you don’t consider “achieved”. Choose quality over quantity.
- Be concise and specific: In the majority of cases, collections of between 10 and 20 samples are the best option to keep your visitor interested. Less than that makes it hard to evaluate and more can be difficult to digest!
- Collect samples and relevant information for each work.
Now that you have a clear list of artworks, you can proceed to gathering the appropriate visual samples and other relevant information.
Sometimes you’ll need several images to convey a particular work. Depending on the nature of the artwork, you may also want to use other media such as video.
Don’t forget the persuasive power of a well-written description to complement a reviewer’s perspective. Decide if your descriptions will relate to each particular artwork or to the collection. This will impact the way you’ll upload your artworks in the next step.
- Identify additional information about you or your career that you want to include in your portfolio.
Texts such as an artist’s biography or an artistic statement will complement and enrich the experience of your art. Depending on your discipline and the stage of your career you might want to add other information, for example publications, press articles or quotes about your work. Think about what do you want to include and make a list.
Useful Tips:
Useful Tips:
Now that you have established the blueprint for your art portfolio, you can start writing and gathering the content material: Visual Samples at the Heart of the Art Portfolio: From the Camera to Plio.
This article was the 4th step of the series: Get your Plio Portfolio Up-and-Running in 10 Simple Steps.