Tips to Create an Impressive Interior Designer Portfolio

Do we need interior design portfolio and carry sizeable files when meeting a potential client and going for an interview? Isn’t it old school to lug around physical copies? Well, you could simply share a link to your social media profile but as a beginner it is almost always advised to share a carefully curated collection of your work, i.e. a professionally created portfolio.
A physical or print interior design portfolio that a potential client or employer flips through will have a better idea of your work and you will find it easier to explain every part of your work more cohesively. Scrolling through your social media might be random and would very much lack a cohesive construct, might confuse the client or employer. However, a carefully curated interior design portfolio, gives you the opportunity to focus on your strengths and most importantly your signature design. You can use creative side to show how you are the right choice for a job.
Interior design portfolios are great for an interview with a potential employer, it crisply lays out your ideas and processes, that can easily demonstrate your philosophy and the way you approach design. So, when creating a portfolio, consider how you’ll use it during an interview or to a potential client to explore your design skills.
Building an impressive Interior Design Portfolio
Building an impressive interior design portfolio is a piece of cake, if you follow these three steps and give it your best. Let’s get started.
1. No sloppy clutter! – Curate and present a professional interior design portfolio. Both your print and digital portfolios need to bring in the A-game. When curating a print portfolio, ensure every image is clear and crisp. No pixelated mess. Invest in good quality prints that highlights and enhances the images. It is the same for digital portfolio. No pixelated pictures.
Ensure all the pictures are clear and appropriately captioned with corresponding description and detailing. While, you might not have the luxury of space in print portfolios, you can go all out and describe and detail your design process online. Ensure to not clutter the web page. It goes without saying that a great design project won’t look so great if it’s on a messy website, in a slideshow that won’t display your photos in the proper dimensions or resolution, or even just presented in a way that doesn’t make it easy for the employer to see your work.
To help you build the best and impressive interior design portfolio, you have numerous resources online that would gladly help you with the physical task of building a beautiful interior design portfolio, with portfolio-building software that allows you to simply choose a template and upload photos.

That’s not all the work. You need to invest some more time to ensure to adjust all photos for optimal brightness and colour. Make sure they’re free of any blurriness and zero pixelation. You can use the opportunity to showcase your design process in detail. Have fun doing before and after shots. Include sketches and preliminary work, not only your final renderings or photos and click the final product. This gives you an opportunity to write about the design development process.
If you worked with a team on several projects, mention your role in the team, and the responsibilities that you chose to accept. Seek to establish yourself as a valuable part of the team that helped make the project a reality. Don’t be afraid to be descriptive in your portfolio, because it gives the prospective employer more insight. That does not mean a novel on interior designing and your process. Use it as a platform for communicating with your client or potential employer.
Here are some tips to establish a communication with a potential employer or client without having to explain every aspect of your work in exhaustive detail.
• The software you used in your projects (including design software, such as Revit or CAD, and also the project management tools and other tools they use to share ideas and information)
• Technical skills you are well-versed with.
• Also, include design related topics that inspire you, such as sustainability, LEED and current commercial interior design trends in design. Most importantly, add an element of empathy to your design portfolio, this makes the portfolio makes it more relatable and endearing that stays with the potential employer or client. If you can include an example of how you incorporated these design trends into your own work.
To bring in the essential element of empathy, you could go a little further and consider writing about your work in a personal blog or on LinkedIn. For a professional website or blog, you can use SquareSpace, WordPress, Wix or approach a professional to set up and share your work.
Finally, your prospective employer should be able to scroll through photos and check out your work in a simple and an intuitive way.
2. Be clear on the impression you wish to create – As a professional interior designer, you might have your doubts when curating a portfolio that has an inclination to one specific niche you might have worked on. You might have worries that it makes your work and portfolio look limiting and restrictive that might not be what companies look for when hiring beginners.
A possible solution to this, will be create a portfolio that highlights your best work that will set you apart from those of other designers and attract prospective employers who share your style. But also showcase your diverse work in your portfolio that gives an impression to your potential employer, that you are open to learning and working on designs that are not your forte. As you build your body of work and working on various projects, you can choose to include only the projects you loved the most.
3. Add an element of story! – We as humans are drawn to stories that we find engaging and relatable. It might be the perfect tool that you are looking for, to communicate and explain your story to clients and employers. Although the portfolio will mainly focus on the photographs of finished projects. You may also want to include design concepts, mood boards, renderings, layouts, and other documents in your portfolio that highlight and engage them in your design process.
These additional images and small narratives about your projects, your clients’ and how you came to understand their needs and what made you create a specific design process, gives potential employers a glimpse into your creative process. A glimpse of a grateful testimonial goes a long way in swaying the client or employer in your favour. They show that you will be bringing expertise, impressive interpersonal skills and thorough planning to each project.
If you don’t have much of an experience as a commercial designer, you can still include a design problem that you solved in a residential project.
When building an impressive interior design portfolio is fun and especially when you’re just starting out. Keep in mind that your prospective employer is not looking for a massive body of work. They simply want to see who you are as an interior designer and the skill set that you bring to work. Your portfolio, even a smaller one, can successfully do that.