The best of new portfolio websites to inspire your own designs.
Have you refreshed your freelance portfolio for 2017 yet? It’s April already, time’s a wasting...
If you’re still wondering how to bring your portfolio up to date, it can be handy to check out what other freelancers have done with theirs.
Here we present nine brilliant freelance portfolios, all fresh for 2017. Meanwhile, if you’ve spotted a new freelance portfolio you feel we should have included, please let us know in the comments below!
Big and bold typography convey a sense of confidence in this freelance portfolio
A freelance UI/UX designer from India, Rakesh specialises in designing apps, websites and brand identities. His portfolio site combines bold, headline style typography with an original design that succeeds in overlaying multiple elements in a balanced and eye-pleasing way: no small feat. We particularly like the unobtrusive, stylish way he’s incorporated testimonials down the left-hand side of the homepage.
A French director, set and paper designer based in Brussels, Alexis Facca is mainly driven by a passion for colours, textures and materials. Given the unusual skillset, it’s appropriate that his homepage is text-heavy, but he makes clever use of old-school computer type to add a sense of fun. Click through to the Work section, and you get an added blast of retro animation... and you have to love the deliberately cheesy eyes that pop up whenever you hover over a project.
Juliette Neveu is a French creative and digital designer who’s currently working in Paris as a freelancer and has done a lot of work for fashion brands. That aesthetic is clearly carried through to the layout and typography of her portfolio, where she provides a satisfyingly comprehensive explanation of what she contributed to each project.
An elegant design combines with some nifty JavaScript tricks
Thadde Meneur is a product and UI/UX designer from Paris. Currently a student at Hetic, he’s been working as a freelance designer for the last three years and is looking for a four-month internship anywhere in the world.
When it’s early in your career, it can be difficult to find a lot of work to include on your portfolio, which can look quite bare as a result. This elegant site combines an elegant design with lots of little JavaScript tricks to fill the gap, and the overall effect is very impressive. We also like that Meneur makes it clear what specific role he played in group projects. Someone give this man an internship!
Will Saunders is an award-winning London-based photographer whose work has appeared newspapers, magazines and exhibitions worldwide. His elegantly art-directed portfolio is a treat for the eyes, making great use of whitespace to focus attention on the beautiful photos, and we found it difficult to stop ourselves scrolling.
Diane Martel is a filmmaker and creative director living in New York City and Los Angeles. Her portfolio website takes a little while to load, but it’s well worth the wait. The homepage features a truly innovative 3D scrolling navigation that’s similar to the Star Wars opener, and is lots of fun to play with. You can enjoy a similar experience on the site of the man who designed it, Ben Wegscheider.
We love the approach to colour on this freelance portfolio
Peter Tait is a multifunctional designer/developer based in Bath, England. While the design of his freelance portfolio is fairly straightforward, we love the way the background colour of each page changes to match each project. It’s a simple but effective idea that could be easily translated to any kind of portfolio. We also like how the call-to-action ‘Available for freelance work’ appears clearly on the homepage. You’d think every freelancer would put this message front and centre, but surprisingly few do.
Lots of lovely images are presented in an inventive way on this freelance portfolio site
Björn Terring is a commercial and lifestyle photographer based in Stockholm. Anyone who’s been staring at a series of carbon-copy portfolios will welcome the stylish, scrapbook-style layout of his image-led site. And the carefully curated selection of work makes it instantly clear where this talented creative is coming from.
The design of this portfolio matches what the freelancer has to offer
Marija Zaric is a web designer living in Belgrade, Serbia who designs “simple and user friendly websites”. And her portfolio site, which uses a minimal colour palette and strips everything back to the bare essentials, is one of them. It’s always good to showcase what you do in the design of your portfolio, as well as its content, and this is a great example of that principle in action.
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Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects.
