expand your web design portfolio

How You Can Expand Your Web Design Portfolio and Gain Great Experience

Web design is not a ‘one size fits all’ industry. Variety is what makes a good web designer. How can you give yourself that experience, though? How can you diversify your portfolio? There are a couple of ways. Some of them might be very worthwhile to you.

Do Unpaid Work

This is what every web designer fears. Unpaid work is the bane of their existence. Monetary motivation doesn’t have to be the sole reason you do web design, though. There’s more to this than just making money. Web design is an art in many ways, and a lot of artists go through periods where they don’t make any money.

Unpaid work is an experience. Experience is invaluable. You get to try out different methodologies and ways of working, without the threat of financial withdrawal hanging over you. Unpaid work can also get you a reputation. You may not gain monetarily, but if you do good work, you’ll get kudos for it. That might eventually start leading to more paid jobs.

Work Outside Your Comfort Zone

If you’ve only made commercial or product websites before, why not try something different? You can be a church website designer if you take a contract from a church group. Even if you don’t particularly care about religion, it can still provide an intriguing challenge. How do you display the locality of this church and the globality of the religion through this website?

What kind of religious iconography do you use? How will you display this information? Working outside your comfort zone can make you think differently about your web design.

Create Mock-Ups

If you currently don’t have any contracts on your plate, why not make a few mock-up websites in your spare time? It’ll allow you to play around even further with your design skills.

With no time constraints on you, you can take your time creating these websites. Even if they never actually go live, they can still be used as a tool for trying out new ideas. Even if they end up a total mess, it’s not like anybody will ever see them.

Work For Multiple Devices

If you are only working on a desktop version of websites, you are purposefully limiting your ability to work. These days the internet is available on a range of mobile devices.

They don’t display websites like desktop, though, due to screen size limitations. As a result, mobile versions of websites are created. Instead of making desktop websites over and over, try your hand at making something smaller for mobile.

Create Apps

App design and website design are indeed different beasts. They share some common principles, though. These design principles can make you think more about the end user’s experience with your websites.

Apps are meant to provide immediate response and clear direction to the information they are requesting. Applying this kind of design philosophy to websites can improve how you create them in the future. It’s also good to have a secondary design talent to round out your skill set for potential employers.