5 Tips For Creating An Architecture Portfolio
One of the most important things you need to do as a freelance architect is to create a strong portfolio. You need to spend some time to tweak and improve your portfolio regularly to ensure it attracts more people. To help you create a strong portfolio here are five essential tips to consider.
1. Go Through All Of Your Material
The first thing you want to do is to go through all of your material from rough sketches to the actual finished projects. At first don’t be too critical but just gather all of the material and slowly start going through all the images and drawings.
You need to use a variety of materials and select pieces that showcase your talent and your style. Sometimes even a stripped version of your idea might better highlight the essence of the idea and your skillset rather than using the finished polished drawing or image.
2. Make It Digital
It is a good idea to make your portfolio digital. Majority of your clients will view your work through a website anyway so there isn’t really that much need for focusing on paper portfolio anymore. It is still a good idea to have but focus more on the digital version of your portfolio.
Keeping a digital portfolio has so many benefits on its side. It is really simple to keep adjusting it as you get more work and you can provide the link to it on websites and e-mails to increase the amount of people viewing it. There are many great tips for creating a digital portfolio at the Digital Tutors website.
3. Place Quality Over Quantity
You want to focus on quality with your portfolio and not quantity. You can include the information about your previous clients and projects on your CV and just add main pieces on the portfolio.
People viewing your portfolio want to be inspired by just looking at few pictures and not by going through pages after pages of your work. If you can’t showcase your talent in a few clever pages then you need to pick better images and sketches to use.
4. Show Versatility
Portfolios should focus on showing your talent the best possible way. And although it is really important to have that niche style as an architect you still want to show flexibility and versatility with your work.
One nice way of doing this is by highlighting the use of different materials. Perhaps you have worked with innovative ideas such as the ETFE roof material as well as with more traditional options. Highlighting these can really boost the value of your portfolio.
5. Include Text
It is important that you keep the main focus of your portfolio on the design. As an architect the visual image is really important. But this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t include any text at all in your portfolio.
It is often really important to add text that tells the person viewing it a little bit more about the project. You can really showcase the idea behind the work and the reasoning that led you to specific design ideas better this way.