Tips for Interior Design Portfolios

Interior design portfolios can involve a range of materials, special requirements, and a lot of quality control to produce a good selection of work. This is a highly visual profession, and your portfolio has to have strong direct visual impact as well as quality and range of production values. Presentation has to be excellent.

Creating a portfolio can also give interior decorators some good marketing opportunities. This profession works on commercial reputation and sales points to a large degree. High quality materials are important for success. Some planning is required to create a really strong portfolio, but it is well-worth doing.

Portfolio issues

Depending on your business specialty, you will require these basic elements in your portfolio:

Materials: Whatever your fundamental materials are, either whole designs or specialized features and elements, the primary selling point in interior design is to show each piece to good advantage. Select your best visual designs, and consider any specific requirements in terms of details regarding components for presentation. If you want to show off a finished product, you will need supporting materials in terms of the materials you used to achieve your result.

Methods of presentation: The curse of interior design is that working across what may be a large range of materials and elements produces a virtual inventory of possibilities for inclusion in your presentation. Working with developers and other professionals also imposes technical requirements where you may need to present a range of options to clients. The best approach to the issue of detail is the "catalog" approach. This creates a good database for your work, as well. The portfolio can be produced easily in digital formats, and you can adapt the materials to any format.

Forms of presentation include:

Hard copy, often useful for personalized presentation to clients.

Slideshows, which are good for major presentations and adapt well to explaining points in your sales work.

Online portfolios, with interactive features are particularly good for detailed exploration of your portfolio. Users can access a lot of material and get specific information. (Note: These materials, when used for sales, can also be interpreted as advertising, for legal purposes. Make sure your content is all correct before posting online.)

Selling points: In any portfolio, there are special top quality materials used as sales points. You will need to tailor your portfolio to your clients, dealing with their specifications, like a design. Use your customized portfolio to highlight good matches with contract and design requirements. This is another area where visual presentation is particularly important, and you may need to create new materials to get the correct effect. This is another good reason for having a digital portfolio to work with, because you can assemble these materials far more easily than hard copy.

Tips for portfolios

To get the best results:

• Be market conscious. Check out your competition, and the upper scale of your line of work, to stay competitive.
  
  
• Use strict quality control on your materials. Don't, ever, include anything which devalues your presentation.
  
  
• Check out in advance any particular areas of demand with contracts and clients.