You can exploit this Achilles’ heel in your clients by giving your portfolio a secondary function so that they will want to hold onto it for longer. The only way for clients to get rid of a physical portfolio is to throw it away to many people, that can seem like a waste. The physicality of a printed portfolio makes it hard for a client to part with it, even if their initial impression of you is chilly. When the samples in a print portfolio are as sharable as possible, they’re that much more likely to be exposed to others. The prints double as postcards, allowing the client to send the artist’s work to others or even display it as décor. Take the example portfolio, which contains several different loose prints of the graphic designer’s work divided into different envelopes. But the works from your printed portfolio can also be shared, so long as you design your portfolio in such a way that allows for it.
One of the perceived benefits of an online portfolio is that each piece of work you share online can stand on its own it can easily be shared through social media or displayed on other sites. It’s not just about the end result but also the work that went into it. Remember how your teachers in school always told you to “show your work?” Knowing how something was made and learning about the process that the artist undertook can help the audience to become more personally invested in it. This sort of picture book quality allows the audience to become invested as they follow the story of how the work came to be, in a format that is easy-to-follow and not excessively wordy. This printed portfolio uses a layout with stitched inserts that first presents the story behind each work, then invites the audience to look inside and see the work for themselves. Include these details in your portfolio so that your client has some insight into your process get a better idea of what to expect from you. Just because something looks good doesn’t mean your clients will know what they are looking at or how it came to be. Remember that the people looking at your portfolio will be much less familiar with your work than you.