Portfolio questions and examples, by field

A good portfolio, in any field, shows a small number of your best pieces with enough context to explain your role and your thinking. What changes by field is the format: designers and developers use websites, architects and art students submit PDFs or slides, writers link published clips, teachers assemble a teaching statement with evidence. Most reviewers want quality over quantity.

A strong graphic design portfolio shows eight to twelve projects that match the work you want, each presented as a short case: the brief, your idea, the process and the final pieces in use. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says employers rely on portfolios to judge designers, so the portfolio usually matters more than the degree.

An art school portfolio is usually 12 to 20 pieces of recent work, submitted as images through a platform such as SlideRoom. Strong ones mix observational drawing with work that shows your own ideas, and include some process, like sketchbook pages. RISD, for example, asks first-year applicants for 12 to 20 portfolio slides and notes that an observational drawing is always a good addition.

The AP Art and Design portfolio has two parts: a Sustained Investigation (15 images with written evidence, 60% of the score) and Selected Works (5 works, 40%). For 2-D and Drawing that is 5 images; for 3-D it is 10, two views of each work. Everything is submitted digitally, and the 2027 deadline is May 7 at 11:59pm ET.

An architecture portfolio is usually a single PDF of 5 to 10 projects in about 20 pages for graduate school, and a shorter, practice-focused version for jobs. Each project shows the idea, drawings (plans, sections, diagrams), models and your role. RIT, for example, asks M.Arch applicants for 5 to 10 projects, about 20 pages, a single PDF under 10MB, with hand drawing included.

A UX portfolio is three to five case studies that explain the problem, your role, how you got to the solution, what changed for users and the business, and what you learned. Nielsen Norman Group, after surveying 204 UX hiring professionals, recommends quality over quantity and notes that hiring managers rarely read a whole portfolio, so each case study must be scannable.

A writing portfolio is five to ten of your best pieces in the kind of writing you want to be hired for, organized by type, each with a line of context. Link to published clips where you can and host copies in case they disappear. Without published work, write samples to the brief you want: a blog post, a case study, product copy.

A teaching portfolio is a document that describes your teaching and shows evidence for it. The usual structure is a contents page, a one-to-two-page teaching philosophy, a record of teaching activities, evidence of effectiveness (evaluation summaries, observations, awards) and appendices with syllabi and materials. Caltech's teaching center calls the philosophy statement the foundational document.