Tips for Writing Project Descriptions in Your Portfolio

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  • View profile for Colton Schweitzer

    Freelance Lead Product Designer & Co-founder

    39,985 followers

    Confession: While I've reviewed thousands of portfolios, I've never read a case study all the way through. I ALWAYS scan them. I just don't have the time to look through every detail. And I know that most other folks who are reviewing portfolios are doing the exact same thing for the same reasons. This means that your portfolio should: 1. Make it easy to scan 2. Use big, high quality visuals 3. Tell quick, concise stories 4. Most importantly, make that story easy to consume in two minutes or less If I were to build my portfolio today, here's how I would do it using these principles: 1️⃣ I'd have a top overview section that has a short blurb of what to expect/what I accomplished AND the final mockups/prototype of what I created. 2️⃣ I'd write out each case study using a word document first to make sure that my headlines told the entire story quickly and concisely. I'd use a classic story arc 1. Context/background 2. Conflict 3. Rising action 4. Climax 5. Falling action 6. Resolution The simpler version of this is the 3 Cs of storytelling: 1. Context 2. Conflict 3. Change (AKA what improved as a result of your work) 3️⃣ I'd optimize my headlines below the overview to tell the story of what I learned. Once everything was written out in a Google doc, I'd edit everything down to the essentials. I'd make sure to pull out the important learnings/quotes and make them big so reviewers could easily scan them. 4️⃣ I'd break up sections with large images to make it feel more interesting and less fatiguing. 5️⃣ I'd ask friends and family to read it and provide feedback about clarity and how much time it took them. If they can easily understand it, see my impact, and quickly go through it, then I'm on the right track. 6️⃣ I'd use LinkedIn and adplist.org to find more folks to provide feedback. Again, I'd focus their feedback on clarity and the amount of time it took for them to go through it.

  • View profile for Matt Mike

    Data Analyst | Power BI Developer | Analytics Engineering | Follow for tips on becoming a data analyst and thriving in your career

    72,710 followers

    Introduce questions and then answer them in your portfolio projects. This narrows your focus in your projects. It is also aligns more with how you will approach projects in the real world. For example, when creating my L.A. Airbnb Listings project in Power BI, here are some of the questions I began with: - How has the market been trending yearly? - What is the average price per night? - How many listings are there in LA? - Where are the most popular listings located? This gave me direction when I began working on my project. It also made it much more interesting. Be sure to speak to those questions and answers in your project description too. This is a way better approach than just throwing out random insights with lots of charts. If you haven’t taken this approach yet, try it out in your next project 😉

  • View profile for Ayomide Joseph A.

    BOFU SaaS Content Writer | Trusted by Demandbase, Workvivo, Kustomer | I write content that sounds like your best AE.

    5,174 followers

    I’m taking a new approach to “content writing” portfolios — and I feel it’s something everyone should do. For the most part, many of us “content writers,” when asked to send a portfolio, send a web page that includes all (or some) of the projects we’ve worked on. While that works and still works, I feel going the extra mile a bit might be the game changer. Instead of simply littering the whole page with links, why not turn it into a case study highlighting your thought process behind the project? Often, when I get on calls with clients, I discover that while they requested you send them a link to your portfolio, many didn’t go through all of the links you put there. On the flip side, when I switched it to case studies, detailing how I went about the project and the result we got, the conversation took a different route—a productive one at that. Clients now see (and know) what to expect, and the sweet part is that they have an idea of your problem-solving skills. Win-win.