When I started writing this entirely subjective ‘How To Put Your Portfolio Site Together’ series it began with me just wanting to tackle the ‘awards’ section. But when I started writing about that I found that it spread into the ‘work’ and ‘about’ sections, and the post was getting too long, so I split it into three posts, and, having served up the starter and main course, I now offer the dessert.

When I worked with Daryl we always had a good laugh at how people portrayed their awards in the Campaign A-List booklet (do they still do that? Campaign is such a venal rag, I have no idea if they even exist anymore. Also, they printed chunks of my blog for years without any kind of recompense or permission, so they can all go and frotter themselves in the ear). 

If an A-lister hadn’t actually won a proper prize in an award scheme but maybe got a longlist or a nomination, they might say ‘recognised by…’. If they were a bit weird, they might list a very high number with precision, like ’78 Gold, Silver or Bronze awards’. If they scored dozens with the piss-easy London International Awards, but fewer from Cannes and D&AD, they might say ‘Golds and Silvers from Cannes, D&AD and London International’.

Other people find unusual ways to say impressive things. I recall one ECD saying he was the only creative with ‘at least a nomination in press, posters, TV and radio at D&AD’. Even if that’s a bit pretzel-y, and three of them are nominations rather than Pencils, it’s still a rare boast. 

So what he did, and what you should do, is make your awards section sounds as substantial as possible. Here’s how to do that, from the bottom up:

If you have no awards, don’t have an ‘awards’ section because it will be empty. Just ignore the whole thing, or add something to your ‘about’ section that says, ‘I also find awards to be vulgar and distasteful’. If you’re just starting out, people don’t really expect you to have won stuff. It’s fine.

Next stage up is a smattering of awards in schemes no one has heard of, and maybe the odd shortlist in something bigger. That’s still pretty cool, unless you’re older (‘I’ve only had one listing in Luerzer’s Archive’ – Junior Creative, aged 54). 

If you’re older and unawarded, also avoid having an awards section, or have one and accept that people will be more likely to hire you for brand experience and/or known-yet-unawarded campaigns, like Autoglass Repair, Autoglass Replace.   

Next is several awards in known schemes, such as Cannes, D&AD, One Show and Clios (Tier One); regional things like Andys, Spikes, New York Festivals, AWARD and Campaign BIG (Tier 2, but maybe Tier One if you’re trying to get hired in that country), also category-specific things like Webby’s and respectable magazines like Creative Review and Design Week); Then the other stuff like Food and Beverage Awards, or PR Week and shit I’ve never heard of.

If you have a bunch of these you can lump them all together under an equivocal word like ‘recognised’, or do the whole ‘number’ thing, but what you DO NOT DO is start listing them one by one over the years. It just looks underwhelming and a bit thirsty.

Next stage is a list worth listing. It doesn’t have to be a Grand Prix every year, but don’t have a five year gap between prizes, or Cannes Golds all in one year, followed by Food and Beverage awards for the following six years. It makes you look like a one hit wonder. 

After that, it’s up to you. I love what my old partner Cam Blackley has done, listing every single award he’s ever won, with the Cannes Titanium and D&AD Gold alongside winners of the APAC Tambuli Awards and Sirens (whatever they are). 

My personal choice was to add the sentence ‘I’ve won dozens of awards and pitches’ to my ‘about’ section. I could list them all, but then I’d run into problems over which work I made and which I CD-ed. If you want to look me up in D&AD’s archive, I hope you won’t be disappointed. In addition, the good CD work is in the ‘work’ section with an attendant explanation.

As a little side point, I think that writing a novel that was published by Penguin and being the advertising columnist for Creative Review are more impressive than a Cannes Gold, but that’s just me. I usually get hired for some kind of writing, so I like people to be sure I can do that to a high standard.

It’s also worth saying that nobody, and I mean NOBODY checks the claims. Where are the non-D&AD stats listed? And even if you found them, why would anyone comb through every year to check the veracity of an awards claim? 

The real lesson? Just ignore all of the above and say whatever the hell you like. 

This is advertising. Just do what you do for your clients, for yourself.

If your creative portfolio is a version of you, then the ‘about’ section is, consciously or otherwise, where you lay your personality bare for all to see.

That’s because you can use it to write absolutely anything about yourself, so those choices will convey your personality as much as the work conveys your mad skillz.

Bearing that in mind, I think ‘about’ sections tend to come in four different varieties:

The first is no-nonsense, where you just get down to brass tacks about your advertising life. This is really just a more elaborate version of your resume, where you take the opportunity to simply list your agencies and the years in which you graced them with your presence.

Sometimes this is a literal list, while other times it’s written as prose, turning a list into a paragraph that’s less convenient to read, but a bit warmer. Either way, it says that you’re either very straightforward, you don’t like to write, you can’t be bothered to write, you’re intensely private, or you’re massively dyslexic and don’t want anyone to know.

Then there’s the self-referential, meta version, where you recognise that the whole thing is a bit silly, and suffuse the facts with an attempt to be an aw-shucks version of charming.

I would count my own ‘about’ section as one of those, but just to prove it’s not just me, here’s one from another creative (I’ve left his name out in case he doesn’t want to be highlighted in this post).

Cheers, I’m (full name) or just (first name), a 34 years old art director and graphic designer currently living in São Paulo, Brazil. I’m very much into branding, editorial design and branded content. Hit me up for a coffee or just to say hi. Here are some random bullet-points to make this about page a bit more personal: Firm believer that RainyMood is the best soundtrack to work. Plays Dungeons & Dragons (just like those kids from Stranger Things). Catdog-person. +3 luck when buying plane tickets.

See? The boring facts, followed by a bit of personality, but presented with post-modern self-awareness. A reflection of personality.

Talking of reflections of personality, you could try for the third type of ‘about’ section and go even further in that direction, mentioning some quite random things that are entirely unrelated to advertising. 

If you go through this deck (thanks, Loz), you’ll find the following information:

I’m an ACD Art Director, designer and hot dog enthusiast.

I love podcasts about design and architecture, all things sci-fi, cats and NBA drama.

I drink whiskey in the winter and mezcal in the summer.I’m not an asshole.

Would a recruiter care that you like architecture podcasts, hot dogs or mezcal? Probably not. Would they believe your own opinion that you’re not an asshole? Also probably not, but it’s all a bit of colour that offers a bit more than a list of agencies you’ve worked at.

Finally, and very unusually, you can just go all out and wrap your life’s work around one quirky-yet-important fact:

One thing you should know about me is that I’d pay a million dollars to go back in time to see Outkast’s 2014 tour. Every penny earned will go to my savings so that if time travel happens during my life, I’m ready.

Professionally, for the past 7 years, I’ve been leading all-star digital content teams for fashion e-commerce and entertainment brands.

Now as an Art Director, I am smashing all my experience, skills, and lifetime desires together so that by the time I finally see the most prolific rap duo of all time, I can return to direct their ads, merch, and everything in between.

I never had the pleasure of seeing Outkast in 2014, but now I really wish I had, and I like the vibe of the person who wrote that short, funny, memorable insight into their personality. Maybe that ‘about’ section is partly why its author works at Mischief@No Fixed Address…

So make your choice, write your little biography and remember the two most important things:

1. Pretty much anything goes.
2. The ‘about’ section doesn’t matter if the work sucks.

Thanks to Wix, Carbonmade and of course Squarespace, we all have a personal portfolio site.

Funnily enough, despite that fact that we are CREATIVES, who live by the core principle of originality, 90% of them are identical.

There are three sections that grace almost every site, so allow me to explain the green flags, pitfalls and workarounds that might help to maximise the ways in which you present yourself to a judgmental, hard-to-please CD.

First you have the ‘Work’ section. This is usually your front page, where various thumbnails will show off your best and brightest ads.

But behind this chirpy presentation are many fretful decisions:

But how old is too old? How obscure is too obscure? Is a so-so piece of work for a big client better than a good piece of work for a smaller client? If your best stuff is a radio campaign, how do you get a prospective CD excited enough to listen to it?

Here are some rules of thumb: the better the work, the longer it can stay on your site. Grand Prix winners can stay forever, but anything that looks VHS-era must now be retired to the knacker’s yard. 

A famous award-winner for a small client is better than something mediocre for Nike, but otherwise Nike, Apple and any other perennially award-winning client should take priority. That’s because the suggestion that you were good enough for the high standards of a great brand is a big plus, even if the actual ad is not one of their best. It also tends to mean that you were hired at a good agency, (although the number of people and places who get to add a Google logo to their list of clients does tend to dilute the prestige of working for that brand).

Any radio ads (or banners, brochures and other less fashionable media placements) must be phenomenally good to be worthy of inclusion. Even though being good at radio is very hard, CDs are less inclined to take the time to listen to it. That said, the fact that you’re including it at all would suggest to me that it must be excellent, or you wouldn’t have bothered.

Of course, we now live in the time of case studies, so you now want as many of those as possible. They do three valuable things, the first of which is to explain all the essential briefing context around your ad. Some might say that’s cheating, as you can’t be there to add the context for the lucky fucker who gets to see your 48-sheet poster, but here in 2025 the rules are different, and context is not just permitted, it’s pretty much mandatory.

The second thing they do is explain campaigns which are now too complicated to speak for themselves. Multi-channel advertising now requires an attendant paragraph that explains just how the banner ads played off the giant inflatable jar of Chicken Tonight, the SEO takeover and the T-shirt someone wore on a podcast recording. And let’s not forget the rolling counter of ‘media impressions’ that always number in the billions.

Third, and probably most important, is the fact that case studies are a relatively new addition to the ‘Work’ section, which means they indicate a degree of recency. So their absence tends to suggest you haven’t done a ‘big’ campaign in the last ten years, which might be a red flag for some CDs and/or resource managers.

What can you do if you have no case studies? Tricky. I produced a couple of campaigns ‘back in the day’ that could quite easily have sustained a juicy 2-minute explanation, but I don’t have the material or the inclination to make a case study out of them. Instead, I presented one of them as a multimedia campaign and leaned into the more unconventional case-study elements instead of the awarded press campaign.

If you feel your work isn’t strong enough to offer 8+ standalone thumbnails, you could always try another path. For example, the ‘sizzle reel’ cut of all your best bits might be the way to go, but having said that, if presented with one of those, I might smell a rat. They’re really for people with lots of great stuff, which they also make available to watch individually.

Another question is how to present work that you’ve CD-ed vs work you’ve created. As we all know, people can get their names on a piece of work just by being in the room while the grown-ups make the magic. Equally, your CD credit might be hiding the fact that you did most of the heavy lifting to elevate a junior team’s so-so idea to a Cannes Silver.

It’s really up to you and your conscience. The best thing might be to add a clear explanation, as I did with the Shot on iPhone section of my portfolio. No one really had the original idea/concept for that campaign, so the creativity came in the execution. There were three main people involved in that, but behind it there were many other creatives, account people, business affairs experts, strategists, music and production geniuses etc., all of whom made the campaign what it was. I haven’t checked all their portfolios, but it’s genuinely a campaign with many parents and midwives, so if everyone involved wants to include it, I think that’s fine.

The other thing to remember with the work section is the extent to which people are in a hurry. No one is poring over every second of everything you do, so it’s important to make things look worthy of attention at first glance.

And that’s what we’re supposed do in our day jobs, so make sure you sell your good stuff as well as you’d sell an Audi R8, a Snickers bar or a campaign to end HIV in Africa.

Best of luck!

Next: the ’About’ section…