Speaker 1If your portfolio looks like a $5 portfolio, you will always be attracting cheap clients who will pay you $5. Maybe your designs are amazing, high quality, professional, and all of that, but if you don't know how to present it in a way that looks expensive and attractive to those high-paying clients, you simply won't get them. After I made the changes that I will talk about, I started getting high-paying clients. Welcome to the Profitable Graphic Designer Podcast. My name is Katie Sandel, and this episode was brought to you by Aventive Academy, an online business education platform that helps brand, graphic, and web designers get more clients, increase their pricing, and build a profitable design career. We have online programs, courses, and templates that you can use, and you can find out more about starting and growing your freelance design business at aventiveacademy.com. A lot of designers struggle with what exactly to put in their portfolio, and not just what to put in that portfolio, but also how to present their work in the best possible way. A few days ago, I had a workshop on how to get four high-paying clients by the end of this year. A lot of designers asked me how to make case studies instead of a portfolio. I will talk about the difference between case studies and portfolio, but what I want to say is that when I was starting as a freelance graphic designer, my portfolio looked like a salad. I like to call it that way, but that basically means that it had everything in it. Since I didn't have much real-life design experience, I haven't had any clients yet, but I needed to showcase my design skills. I included all my student work, and don't get me wrong, like my student work wasn't too bad, but it wasn't good either. I had a logo for an imaginary hotel, poster for an imaginary show, a website design for an imaginary company, and you get it, you get it, right? However, the problem with that is that when a client lands to, to my portfolio, especially at that time, they would see a lot of different things and that would confuse them. Now, the conceptual work, the conceptual projects, like imaginary things are, you know, that's not a problem. Having that kind of work, if you didn't have real clients, is totally fine. You should do that too, if you haven't had enough clients and don't have enough work to put in your portfolio. The problem here was that, and that's just that it was too bad, but it was too broad, like so, so broad. I thought that by showcasing as many things as possible, I will show to the potential clients how I can do it all, when in fact, I was confusing them and showing that I'm not an expert in anything and that I do a little bit of everything. A little bit of everything can be fine, but we still have to position ourselves as the best possible option for them, as the best possible designer, that can help them either grow their business or provide whatever they're looking for, right? So after I really wanted to improve my portfolio and, you know, get to the next level of my own design business, I decided to narrow things down. And at that time, I wanted to become a logo designer only, which I am not today, but I started putting my logo designs only. And that did help because if people were getting to my website, seeing, just logo designs. However, just putting logo designs on white background, you know, just logo design on the background, that doesn't help. You have to have a nice 3D presentation, having nice mock-ups, and I'll talk about it in a second. So yeah, even though focusing on kind of becoming a logo designer only helped, but it wasn't until I figured out that I should have case studies and not portfolio on my website. So portfolio is what a lot of designers actually have. And that is when you include visuals only on your website or in your online portfolio, wherever you store your work. Let me give you an example. Let's say you did a branding for a restaurant and maybe you designed a logo for them, business cards, you know, like stationery, flyers, website, and you include a logo for them. You include just that in your portfolio and it's all nicely organized. It's scrolling content. However, it's still just visuals. That is a portfolio. Case studies are something completely different. It's still, a case study still includes a whole portfolio, but it also has description. So it has everything from the beginning of that project till the end. It can include the challenges your client had, solutions, who was on the team, how the project went, how long it took to complete that project and all that. So it's really like a case study. You know, it's a portfolio with text, with descriptions. And why you need a case study is because your potential clients want to know how it is to actually really work with you, not just what your design skills are, but how the whole process will go after they hire you. A case study shouldn't be short, but also it shouldn't be super long. You don't want it to look like a blog with random images in between. You still want it to remind of a portfolio. It needs to look very creative. And my advice would be to go online and find mock-ups. You can get mock-ups from Design Cuts, Creative Market, Behance. You can just Google them, Graphic Burger, Free Pick. There's so many different websites where you can get mock-ups from. Mock-ups are really cool 3D presentations where if you, for example, designed just a logo for, let's say, a coffee shop, you can, instead of placing that logo on a white background, like, hey, this is my logo design, you can actually download mock-ups of a coffee cup and then place that logo on that coffee cup or a poster or maybe even like a car wrap or whatever it is. Because clients cannot really picture how their designs are going to look like in the real world scenario. So they, they want to see the 3D presentations versus just 2D where it's like your design's flat on the surface. Now, when it comes to mock-ups, it is very easy for us to overuse it. In fact, one of our students in the Profitable Designer program, she overused mock-ups based on, you know, thinking how that's going to show to the client her design skills. But what that did is a lot of clients, actually thought that she's a photographer because all those, so let's say coffee cups, those are all like photos. And then basically you place your logo on top. However, it totally looked like she's a photographer and she took a photo of that cup instead of showcasing her graphic design skills. Now people thought she's a photographer. So she had to step back and remove some of the mock-ups from her portfolio and actually show them to the client. And actually add more graphics. So that's why, you know, it's really important to find that balance. You can also go ahead and Google some other graphic designers and see what they've been doing in their case studies. Especially if you go to Behance, you will see a lot of, a lot of amazing designers who are sharing their work, their case studies, expanding their portfolio into case studies and adding amazing descriptions. Now don't copy them. Just look for inspiration. And create something like that or better than what you see. When it comes to the description, my advice is to have around 500 words. You can have it less. You can have it more. It really depends on what the project is about. But I think that 500 words is just enough for clients to get that feeling of how it is to work with you and what the process looked like when you worked on this project. Even if that project was a conceptual project, and you know, you did something for an imaginary client, you still want to talk about the process, your thoughts, maybe your sketches, how many different logo designs you created, how long it took, how you converted that into an illustration, what program you used, and all that. However, they want to get to know you, your work, and your process. So 500 words is my recommendation. I think that's a really good start. In that description, you want to talk about the brand, so who the client was. Even if it was an imaginary client, you would still talk about, let's say that's a hotel. You would still talk about that hotel, how the hotel was looking for a logo design, brochure, website, whatever you designed, right? Then you'll talk about the challenge, the outcome, maybe scope of the project, who was on your team, if you have a team, maybe about the story of that brand, how brand discovery went, what the messaging was about. Maybe it was a rule, So you're going to talk how the brand looks like. before and after. And especially if you have those amazing before and after images, that would be getting it to the next level. If you design packaging design, you will talk about it. Then if you worked on their website, you'll also talk about it, like what pages you designed, what platform you used, things like that. So it's really easy actually to create descriptions because you're just describing the project you designed. And when it comes to how to post that in your portfolio, my suggestion is to start with an image and then have a little bit of text, like one or two paragraphs, then have an image again, then a little bit of text and, you know, go image, text, image, text, and so on until you complete the project, the case study. That way you don't separate the visuals from the text, but it's not going to be a lot of work. So if you have a little bit of text, it's going to be a lot of work. So if you have a little bit of text, all in one, and it looks really like a high-end full project that you worked on. And it's not like you're showcasing, here's the logo, here, you know, is the brochure, websites, packaging, whatever it is. And then this is the description. And then nobody's going to read that description because when they see a lot of text, people will just, you know, move on to the next page or to the next designer, which is even worse. So you really want to keep them engaged on your website and on your, you know, portfolio or now case study page. So you really want to show them, this is the logo, then description. This is the label or packaging design. And this is the description. This is the website. This is why we designed this and that on this website. This is how we did it. And so on. So like really think from your customer perspective and what is that that they want to see and hear before hiring a designer. Case studies also help to land high-paying clients and when I say high-paying clients, I mean, at least $5,000 per project. So 5, 10, 15, 20, even $45,000, if that's what you're getting in terms of the leads. And that's because when they see a case study versus just a portfolio or just a cool logo without a mock-up, they see that as, you know, it's kind of like cheaper and more expensive portfolio, right? So if you have just a portfolio, it's fine. But if you have just a portfolio, it's fine. But if you have just a If you want to level up, if you want to start getting high-paying clients, if you want your portfolio to look more expensive, then case studies are the way to go. I also want to mention that if you want to learn more about upleveling your portfolio, I do have a free workshop. So, you know, it's completely free and it's for brand graphic and web designers. And what's included is three steps to uplevel your design portfolio to land 12K clients even if you're new to freelancing, you can register for it. I'm going to leave a link below this episode. And in this free workshop, you will learn how to design amazing portfolio pieces that set you apart from other designers, plus how to know when your design skills are good enough. Then I also talk about the exact number of portfolio showcases you need to include to impress your ideal clients and how to present your work using mock-ups. So clients ask, so when can we start? It's a really cool, valuable pre-recorded workshop that you can watch anytime. You just need to register for it. So either you can watch it at your schedule time whenever you want, or you can watch a replay because we do send it. However, you have to register for it. And you're going to learn all about how to uplevel your portfolio, how to get to the next level. In my free workshop, I show you real life freelance portfolio, examples. So I literally share my screen and show you what you shouldn't do and what you should do if you want to get high paying clients. So yeah, my advice is to just sign up and I'll see you there. Thank you for joining us today on the Profitable Graphic Designer. In addition to this podcast, we have created some amazing online courses to help you set up your business, get more clients and scale to the income level you desire. If you need help developing your freelance portfolio so it stands out. If you want to learn how to create proposals, new clients will say yes to. If you're still trying to figure out how much to charge for your services. And if becoming the go-to designer for your dream clients is your goal this year, then I invite you to enroll in my signature 12-week program, The Profitable Designer, or one of our other specialized online courses. To learn more about the programs and get started, visit Aventive Academy. me.com. See you next time.
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