A portfolio page from your résumé, walked end to end

The portfolio builder takes three moves, and the material for it already exists if you have written a résumé. What follows is the journey as it runs.

Choose a design

Each is a complete hand-built page rather than a theme over a template, which is the subject of designing twenty portfolio worlds. The gallery lets you read a design at full size first, which is the same principle as the letter gallery.

Fill it from your résumé

Choose Fill from my résumé and your roles, projects and outcomes arrive, after a review of what was read. You switch each entry to Shown or Hidden and correct it: a name, your role, a period, one line about what changed, and optionally a subtitle, a short description, highlights, a link and tags. It does not write your entries and it does not add projects you have not done.

The step that takes the longest

The one-line summaries. A résumé bullet is written for one reader with a job in mind; a portfolio entry is read by a stranger with no context. Rewriting each into a sentence that says what the thing was and what changed is the real work, and case studies in a portfolio covers the longer version.

Preview and publish: the real thing

Preview & publish renders your actual page, with a desktop and a phone switch. It is not an image of a page and it is not a device mock. Read it at phone width in particular, because that is where most people will see it, which is argued in phone width is the page that publishes.

Publishing, which is optional

Publishing is an action on that same view rather than a fourth step. The publish sheet asks for your address, and publishing gives you an edit key; no step requires an email. It can be undone, and the whole decision is weighed in publishing a portfolio or keeping it private.

Then the line on the résumé

A portfolio nobody can find is a page you made for yourself. The link belongs in the contact details of the document, which is covered in linking a portfolio from a résumé, and choosing the address itself in choosing a portfolio address.

The check nobody does, and should

Read your own page at phone width as though you had arrived from a link in a message. Most portfolio pages are designed at desktop width and met at 390, and the difference is not subtle: a hero that works across a wide screen becomes three screens of scrolling before the first piece of work appears. Preview & publish has the phone switch for exactly this, and it renders the real page rather than a picture of one. If the first thing a stranger sees on a phone is not a piece of your work, the entries are in the wrong order.

What this page does not claim

Twenty minutes. The slug says so and we have not timed anybody, so the honest description is three moves with one of them requiring thought. It also does not claim a published page changes an outcome, because nothing here measures that. What is claimed is what the product does: authored designs, material taken from your own document, the real page rendered at both widths, and publishing as a reversible action.

One decision worth making before you start rather than halfway through. A portfolio is public in a way a résumé is not, so anything switched on is visible to a current employer, a client who has not announced a project, and anyone else who has the address. Deciding which entries are publishable in the builder is much easier than deciding it under Preview & publish with a finished page in front of you, and what a portfolio proves that a résumé cannot covers what belongs there in the first place.

A final note about what to do when you have very little to show. Build the page anyway, with two entries rather than eight, and do not publish it. A page with two well-written pieces of work is a useful thing to have ready, and the discipline of writing those two entries usually improves the résumé lines they came from. Publishing is a separate action taken later, when there is a third entry worth adding, and nothing about the work is wasted in the meantime.