101 Awesome Portfolio Sites
By Steven Snell | August 3rd, 2008 in Inspiration
For designers, having a great-looking portfolio site is one of the best ways to attract attention to your services and to quickly prove to potential clients that you are capable of high quality work. If you’re working on building or re-designing your own portfolio, you should definitely find some inspiration from sites featured here (shown in no particular order).
UPDATE: We recently launched a gallery dedicated to showcasing the best portfolio sites – Folio Focus.
For more portfolio inspiration see:
105 Responses from Readers
Great list! I am re-designing my portfolio site right now and although it’s close to being done, this list is certainly good for inspiration, and to see what else is out there.
All fantastic site – no doubt about it. You’ve done really well compiling this amazing list.
However, it would be really amazing to see some lesser known sites. I’ll bet that almost every designer that sees this article will recognize 90% of these designs. While this isn’t a bad thing – because the sites are all amazingly-well designed – it would be great to have something new in the mix.
But again, great work!
Shannon,
Good. I’m glad it can help.
Brian,
I can’t argue with that. Thanks for your feedback.
They’re all beautiful, but then again, they all look a bit alike.
thanks for the link up! Glad you like my work
brilliant!!!!!!!!!!!!
Brilliant stuff, its strange being featured among so many designers that I admire. I think my favourite has to be “Deaxon” – I just love that site. Nice stuff!
Nice list of portfolios.
There is too many to pick a favorite from.
thx 4 add my page! Nice overview!
Great post! Each one of these sites is incredible… you must’ve spent ages finding them all.
Nice list! The Things We Make is one of my favs… A few new ones here that I will have to check out!
this list seems to be only taking visual design in consideration, not code strength, validity and accessibility.
Quote:”I think my favourite has to be “Deaxon” – I just love that site. ”
Try increasing the font size in your browser preferences by 2 points. You’ll see that the design is broken and the site unusable. That should be taken in consideration when making these lists. If a site design is broken with a 2 points bigger font size, it means it is poorly coded, difficult to update and manage, and will probably be unusable on mobile phones or text-only web devices.
These are issues that any web designer should be concerned with.
Hi, thanks for the fantastic and full list!
A good beginning place for students building digital portfolios.
@sebastien – I see what you’re saying, but It doesn’t change my opinion. I still love it. What’s wrong with just liking something because it looks good anyway?
Very nice list here. Lot’s of inspiring ideas.
Hey, thanks for including my portfolio in this list of awesome sites. It’s quite an honor!
Excellent list of portfolios. It’s amazing the amount of creativity there: so many portfolios, yet each is individual!
Thanks for gathering these sites in one place.
Joost,
I don’t see how you can say they all look alike. Some are artistic using illustrations, some are minimal (two very different styles), some are light, some are dark, some use tons of images, some don’t use any.
Sebastien,
You’re right, the sites were chosen almost exclusively based on looks. My purpose with the post was to provide some design inspiration, not code inspiration. Looking at it again, maybe the post title wasn’t as clear as it could have been. If a site looks great but has some coding issues, the coding can be fixed/changed. You can still achieve the same look with better coding. My point was not to put these sites on a pedestal to say that they’re all perfect.
nice list, but this should really be called 101 awesome blog sites, since pretty much all have the same blog style layout…
Thanks for mentioning us on this list, awesome company to be in!
@sebastien – I totally agree with your point on font resizing. I went back and tested our home page and it does indeed withstand the two size change in Safari. That is one thing I always preach to our team.
As for conformity, I definitely don’t think all of these sites look familiar. Of course there are a few UI standards to follow but outside of that, there is quite a mix of designs here.
Tony
Fantastic list and an inspiration. I intend to one day design something that will make it onto a similar list.
very nice list thanks for putting it together.
Max | Design Shard
Fantastic list. I would agree that this might be called 101 Awesome Blog Sites
Hey! Thanks for including me on the list. Awesome!
Hey! I’m so happy to be included in this list
thank you so much.
Coooooooooooooooooool!!! Loads of thanks for adding me to the list!!!
Nice list.
@Sebastian, I agree – it would be nice if everyone coded to take the little (but important) things into account but it is also good to see people pushing blog templates in new directions to avoid them all looking the same. As Steven Snell put, you can always improve the code later on, which is easier than improving a design..
Great list. Hope one day my portfolio will make it to the top 102! Thanks for the inspiration.
hey all great websites here….can any1 tell me hw these sites utilized d entire size of d pages, are they all CSS???
@tripsville
w these sites utilized d entire size of d pages – what do you mean?
are they all CSS??? – Yep!
Nice List! Mine is http://www.richardcastera.com
thanks for adding us to the list Steven!
nice collection with various styles. it’s cool if you keep the list going longer
Digital Mash…..fantastic!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Nice job all of you… keep up the good job… As a freelancer, I continuous learning and getting all the best info from the BEST… http://www.rickywilson.ws
Nice list of portfolios.
There is too many to pick a favorite from.
I expected to see http://www.bearskinrug.co.uk and http://www.circografico.com.ar here, both examples are top quality portfolios, plenty of originality.
Indispensable list– I have to say, as one of those rare designers who values code strength as well as design aesthetic, I have to agree with Sebasiten’s comment. Though, as a user, I sort of expect aesthetic to be sacrificed when increasing font size. Well done!!
Hi. Great list of inspirations, thanks for including us on the list ♥.
Ok, these all look the same and they are not awesome portfolio sites. They have zero individuality and lack concept. If you want to see samples of good portfolio work then go to digitalthread.com or designcharts.com, these websites have really good portfolio samples and very successful design websites.
I launched my portfolio yesterday and maybe somebody is interisted http://www.matthiasdittrich.com. It is a slim list of my projects as interaction designer. I used flash papervision to find a new unused look.
Thanks for adding our site (ImageX Media). I’m proud of the work our design team has done and appreciate you recognizing their work
Glenn
Great list, a complete mix and contrast in styles. Some really inspirational and enviable ideas.
very nice portfolios, thanks for the list..
The thumbnail image for http://www.davidhellmann.com/ is different here. The live site is having a new design. Pls. update it.
div,
This post is old and the blog gets updated quite frequently. There is no way I can keep all of the images up-to-date with re-designs. I would spend all of my time checking to see what had been changed and updating it on my site.
There are some really awesome portfolios here! I think Tony Geer’s portfolio looks the best out of all of them. He has a great sleek, and modern design.
Very inspirational. I used some of the websites above for inspiration not too long ago on my own portfolio. Brilliant post!
Amazing collection… each and everyone of them is better than the other… superb… jam packed inspiration…
coooooool
that’s is most beautiful collection I had ever seen
Very inspirational. So jealous
Great sites!
I’m working on my portfolio, I would like to criticize to improve.
http://www.joseacreative.com/
Thanks for posting! I’ve really enjoyed looking through this list, and I’ve pulled some fresh new ideas from some of the sites.
Some really Great Designs, Credit to the designer of course.
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