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Your Portfolio Site, Part One: The Work.

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…