My favourite 10 portfolios « Help Developer - Graphic and Web Design Blog with Collections, Freebies, Tutorials and Forums

31 August 2008 - Posted in Sites

My favourite 10 portfolios

I am always looking for inspiration in web design and where better to look than designers portfolio’s, after all the design of their sites and projects tells you a lot about their skills and styles and can give you hints about what the current trends in the design industry are. In this list I am going to give you my 10 most favourite portfolios I have come across and have used for inspiration alongside CSS galleries. These are in no particular order because to me they are all 10/10.

Marius Roosendaal

Brown is one of my favourite colours at the moment and this design uses it brilliantly, it also makes great use of the space to show off the designers full portfolio by using an accordion. It doesn’t just come in brown as well, you can change the theme of the site to your taste. And it wouldn’t hurt to take a look at the actual portfolio as well, Marius is a great designer and theres a lot of inspiration in there.

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Church Plant Media

I tend to design professional looking templates more than anything else and Church Plant Media are one of the leaders in this area I think, their site looks professional and clean, but I’m more interested in their design frames, they have some of the nicest templates I have ever come across, great for some inspiration.

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Church Media Group, Inc

Similarly to ChurchPlantMedia, Church Media Group also have a very nice site design and a nice portfolio of designs as well. It looks clean and is easy to navigate.

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GZ Design

I came across this portfolio a couple of days ago, it uses SIFR on some of the headings but they seem to have not done their homework because it adds a white background in Firefox and there are a few bits and pieces that don’t work such as the lack of a fluid backdrop, but what I like about this site is their portfolio, especially the Metro Driving School design and the header area of the site.

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Andrea Cima Serniotti

I am really liking patterned backgrounds at the moment and these type of subtle backgrounds are my favourite, they don’t distract the attention yet continue to add a nice professional finish. This portfolio has a nice simple one page layout with all the details you need to know, a lot of portfolios are getting cluttered as they want to show off all their work, this portfolio shows off the best bits and uses some smooth animation to hide the text until needed.

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Dairien

The wooden look is very common at the moment and quite rightly so, it adds warmth to a site and Dairien offers warmth even with the design’s light white and gray finish which also makes the layout look very sleek and stylish. As with the previous entry, this portfolio features all the information you need on one page in an organised fashion with the added extra to view extended portfolio items and a bit more on what is available in the way of services. A great looking simple yet elegant portfolio.

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Monk Development

Brown is my favourite colour at the moment, followed by green and Monk Development’s portfolio makes nice use of this and accompany it with a turquoise. Monk Development are CMS developers but they have a very nice design on their site and their clients sites are very professional looking.

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Jason Reed

An important part of web design is making good use of space and this portfolio is one of the best that I have seen as an example of this. Jason Reed’s portfolio uses MooTools to create a vertical accordion which means that 4 times the amount of information can be fit into the same space. His portfolio lands himself in my personal favourites everytime, it just looks so clean and in a way homely even though it uses white as its main colour, I think this is down to the very nice friendly looking sketch in the top right corner and the handwritten logo, great job.

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CelebPlain

I was talking earlier in this post about simplicity and one page designs and you don’t get much simpler than this, almost too simple in some ways. CelebPlain displays 3 pieces of work and a link to more in a blog style layout and a link at the bottom to email the designer, thats it. It uses the wooden effect and some very nice fonts. Great simple portfolio and some fantastic pieces of work as well.

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Pouzada

My final favourite is a portfolio that shows off their work with massive images to really show you the little details that most portfolio’s don’t show until you actually view the project itself. I also like the pink and black combo which is used effectively to make the headings stand out.