Ref PR 03 · Practice and business How to build an online art portfolio

1. What a folio is for

A commissioner looking at a folio is answering one question: can this person make the picture I need, on time, without supervision. Everything that helps answer it belongs. Everything else, including the work you are fond of and the work that took longest, is noise.

That is why an archive is a bad folio. An archive shows range across years; a folio shows control over one thing right now.

2. The edit

Cut first, arrange later. A general folio of twelve to twenty pieces is enough for most markets; a folio aimed at a single commissioner is stronger at eight to twelve. The count matters less than the consistency: if a viewer cannot say what you make after four pictures, the edit has failed.

• Remove student exercises, fan art that copies another designer's character, and anything you would not want to be asked to repeat.
• Remove near duplicates. Two versions of the same idea halve the strength of both.
• Keep unpublished personal work if it points at the jobs you want next. Commissioners do not mind that it was self set; they mind that it is weak.
• If a piece needs an explanation to work, it is not a folio piece.

3. Order and grouping

Open with your strongest piece and close with the second strongest. Group by market or by kind of job, never by chronology: a commissioner who came for book covers should not have to scroll through packaging to find them.

If you genuinely work in two distinct areas, give them two sections with their own landing pages rather than mixing them in one grid. Mixed grids read as indecision.

Wide table: scroll it sideways.

4. What each piece says

Under every image, in one or two lines: what the job was, who it was for if you are allowed to say, what you contributed if it was a team, and the year. That caption does three jobs at once. It shows you understand a brief, it lets a commissioner picture you in their own job, and it makes the page findable, because search engines read the caption and the alt text while the picture itself stays opaque to them.

Process shots are worth including only where they teach something: a rough against the final, a colour study, a rejected direction. Twelve steps of a painting is a tutorial, not a folio.

5. The site itself

Four pages are enough: the work, a project page pattern, an about page, and a contact address. The about page needs a photograph of you, a plain sentence saying what you make and for whom, your location and your working languages. The contact page needs an email address that you read, written as text, not hidden behind a form that eats messages.

Buy the domain in your own name and keep the folio on it, even if you also post work on social platforms. Platforms change their rules, their layouts and sometimes their existence; a domain you control can be rebuilt anywhere in an afternoon. Keep a local copy of every file you publish.

6. Technical checks

• Image size: export at the pixel width the layout actually uses, then check the page weight on a phone connection. A folio that loads slowly is a folio that is not seen.
• Colour: convert to sRGB for the web. A file left in a wide gamut profile can look flat or oversaturated in some browsers.
• Alt text: describe the picture in a sentence. It serves readers using a screen reader first, and retrieval second.
• Page titles: one per page, naming the work and the market. Not "Untitled" and not the file name.
• No PDF only folios. A commissioner will not download a file to decide whether to open it.
• Test on a phone. Most first looks happen there, often between two other things.