A beautiful and effective portfolio is concise, consistent, and simple in the ways it communicates your work. 

To begin, you should first ask yourself a few questions:

1. Who is the intended audience?

Architects and Designers have multiple audiences: a general public, potential clients, government agencies, employers, academics, and other architects to name just a few.  As such, we find ourselves often re-formatting, editing, and rewriting the narratives of our creative outputs to meet those audiences.  A public audience might not be as knowledgeable to the nuances of plan and section details that an academic or professional audience might gravitate to.  While you might need multiple types of images to communicate a narrative around your work, consider what images get highlighted and in what order they are presented.  Sometimes the decisions of what to omit are just as important as what to include.

2. How will the work be received?

Often considered in relation to audience, the format of delivery is another consideration to make with a porfolio.  We’ll often create versions of our work as physical books, websites, slide presentations, and videos.  The format changes the way we communicate the content of our work.  A physical book, for example, might show the contents a video through a series of still images. Whereas a video might read selections from a text overlayed ontop of corresponding imagery.  A digital book might be desired over a typical indexed website to replicate the way physical story books sequentially unfold narratives.  

It is important in making decisions about formats the way the work will be read and received.  

Making Design Decisions


Size and Proportion
Grid Layouts
Font Choices
Color Palette