In this video, we will address some strategies for building a fashion portfolio website. Whether you’re a fashion designer, a stylist, a model, or a hair & makeup artist, your portfolio is your professional calling card. It is a way for you to demonstrate your skills and experience to potential clients and employers.
It’s essential to have a website that shows off your talent and effectively communicates the services you offer.
1. Don’t be Afraid to Start Small
The biggest thing we hear from people in the early stages of making their portfolio is that they worry they don’t have enough images. Some of the best portfolios we see are members who have a small, curated selection of their best work. Don’t be afraid to start with a single gallery page with 10 or so of your best images. Your website will grow with your career and when you are ready you can add different sections for new skills, collections, and services.
2.Find a Theme That Works for You
Themes on Format affect the layout of your gallery pages, site menu, and collection pages. The attributes and customization options vary from theme to theme so previewing themes to test these out with your own images is a great idea. Upload a few images on a gallery page and toggle between themes to find a layout that works best for you.
For fashion sites, I generally recommend themes with a titled or staggered gallery page so that potential clients can quickly get a sense for your style. For tiled and staggered galleries, I recommend themes like: Flare, Foreground, Post, and Aperture.
Horizontal scrolls are also popular on fashion sites because these mimic the feeling of leafing through a magazine. For a Horizontal scroll, check out our themes: Gloss, Reel, and Horizon.
3. Use Your Navigation and Collection Page to Tell the Story of Your Skills
Make a gallery page for each style of work or skill you are hoping to show off and add these to your site menu or collection page.
Models, stylists, and makeup artists will create pages with titles like “editorial,” “celebrity,” “advertising.” By organizing your portfolio into sections of related work, it helps to guide the viewer experience of your site and show off your varied skills.
If you are a freelancer or targeting speaking directly to clients, structure your site menu by the types of services you offer to reinforce what you can do for your clients.
Also consider making your homepage a bold collection page, which will tell the story of your services. A collection page is an image navigation. Use the collection page to link to galleries with each one relating to a service or skill you are trying to highlight.
4. Custom Pages for Contact, About and CV pages
Custom pages are just what they sound like–customizable pages where you can achieve your own layout by using different content blocks. Fashion professionals commonly use custom pages for Contact, About, and CV pages. When you first go to make a custom page, you’ll see the option to start from scratch or from a template–both options are fully customizable. For Cvs especially, I recommend using one of our templates. These templates have been built by our designers to look great when optimizing for mobile.
When building these pages, keep in mind how paragraphs and sections will stack for mobile display. As you are working on a page, click “edit design” and toggle to mobile display to double- check your page layouts as you go.
5. Look at Other Sites as a Model of What to Include in Your Portfolio
When we are getting started in our careers, we learn from examples we see in our professional communities. Bring the same strategy to building your portfolio. Look at the websites of people in your industry and see how they present their work on their website.
Go to format.com/customers to see examples of member websites broken down by profession. Under Fashion you can review the sites of Fashion Designers, Models, Stylist, Hair and Make Artists, and More!
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