Architecture Portfolio Websites | Tips and Examples

We're moving away from handing out physical portfolio books and moving towards online portfolios because they're quick to share and update and offer many more opportunities for marketing. Every creative career requires a portfolio regardless of whether you work freelance or joining an architecture firm. Your portfolio showcases your best projects, inspiration, and processes to give your clients an idea of what it would be like to work with you.

Luckily, it's easy to get started with an online portfolio. Platforms like Format take a lot of the leg work out of setting up a website so that you can focus on the design and content. Want more tips on how to get started? Please read our guide to architecture portfolio tips.

As a visual industry, you're going to need high-quality photos to showcase your best projects. You can hire a professional to shoot your design work, but if you plan on doing this all yourself, you need a little more than your phone camera to get the best shots. Use a camera that can shoot in RAW to have more control of editing the image. You don't need to buy the most expensive camera out there, but you need to know how to capture high-quality images for your portfolio.

If you want to shoot like an old-school pro, view/press cameras allow for large format photography, which delivers the most professional-looking images for traditional-style architectural photographs used in physical portfolios. These aren't exactly budget-friendly cameras, and if you're on a budget, you should look to the next couple of steps to make your architecture portfolio stand out.

You can convey a completely different mood and story of a building just by changing the angle of how you soot. Do your research on the building or space you are photographing—and don’t forget to consider its environment—to find small details that may be otherwise unnoticed. Unique angles can help you capture interesting photographs of buildings and interiors. 

While high-end renderings of your designs make the design process easier, there's an unspoken understanding among professional architects that they should be able to sketch their designs well too. If you can find creative ways to include your sketches in your portfolio, it can show off your artistic talents, and communicate your design process and thinking style to other architects.