Portfolio Ideas For New(er) Interior Designers

Nov 30

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Neutral pastel image of an interior designer's office.

How To Create An Interior Design Portfolio When You’re Starting Out

Whether you’re an interior design student or you’re making a career change, your portfolio can be a source of anxiety.

Your portfolio plays a key role in marketing your design skills and business, so what to do if you’re just starting out and don’t *exactly* have a portfolio yet?

Well that’s a whole additional layer of anxiety, am I right? I’ve absolutely been there wondering “How am I everrrr going to get design clients if I don’t already have client work to show them?!” Yep, I remember lying in bed turning this one over in my head. 🛌🏻

So to help out, I brainstormed a list to help generate ideas and material for your own up-and-coming designer portfolio.

The goal here isn’t “fake it til you make it” - it’s to show what you’re capable of doing, your enthusiasm for your particular design niche, and to communicate to potential clients or employers that you’re a “can-do” individual with a work ethic to match.

Before you know it, you’ll have a few clients under your belt and you’ll be off and running, but to help get you to that point, I have a few ideas:

Want specific strategies for finding clients and content repurposing? Check out my free workshop on finding your first interior design clients:

Interior design portfolio ideas for up-and-coming designers

Mood Boards

Your mood boards don’t have to be for real projects. Whether or not a client hired you to do it doesn’t matter. They can be very pragmatic and project-oriented (e.g. “Minimalist Living Room”) or more artistic to highlight your overall creative abilities. (In other words, go ahead and put the *mood*in mood board!)

Digital mood boards are standard but a physical board well photographed can be compelling and showcasing a second talent.

For a review of interior design mood board options, read “How To Create An Interior Design Mood Board”
For the mechanics of making an easy, beautiful mood board, check out the post and Youtube video on “How to Create A Mood Board With Canva”
If you’re a LinkedIn Learning member, you can check out my course on Creating a Mood Board.

Create Your Own Portfolio Pieces

Just-starting-out designers do it all the time. Create “conceptual projects” and showcase them on your website portfolio page and on social media.

Mood boards, e-designs, DIYs, hypothetical design problem solving. You could find images of rooms-that-desperately-need-help, and redesign them. Create “Before and After” images using software of your choice or even hand-draw over them or create new sketches and scan them.

Whether or not you had an actual paying client is not what’s important. What matters is that you have the ability to execute the work.

Student Work

If you’ve taken design classes (digital courses or IRL) - student work is more than appropriate when you’re starting out. Take those student projects either as-is or improve upon them if you want, and put them in your portfolio.

Discounted Work

Do some discounted work to build your portfolio. I’m going to say up front though, I’m not a fan of doing free or heavily discounted work. When you discount your work, people often discount your value. (Speaking from experience again here...) But if you deem it a worthwhile cause, this can be a good way to get some experience and portfolio pieces under your belt.

Your home as your design laboratory

Feature your home as your design laboratory - document home improvement projects. I know I’m preaching to the choir with this one, but I’m still gonna say it! Heck, that’s how Joanna Gaines put them on the map!

Phone cameras are advanced enough now to do a good job at capturing your work. No spectacular full room shots required (few of us have those swoon worthy shots) so just focus (pun intended) on making it look interesting
Showing your design process in addition to the finished project can also be really effective. We see this technique used all the time on social media to great effect. (For your actual Portfolio page though, it’s often a cleaner look just to show the pretty end result.)

Photography

This leads me to Photography - another creative and portfolio-worthy skill for sure.

Capture small vignettes of your home or whatever strikes your fancy that will help convey your design sensibility. A moody landscape, a close up of a building detail, or whatever captures your imagination.

Styling capabilities goes hand-in-hand with photography too.

CAD - Drafting / Rendering Skills

Showcase your drafting/rendering skills. Let’s face it, a lot of firms care more about those skills for their junior designers than actual design skills. (Just keepin’ it real here…)

There’s a LOT that needs to be drafted/rendered at any busy firm. Maybe they currently outsource that work and could keep it in-house with your fresh set of skills. Many principals - ahem - don’t have the most up to date software/tech skills so they need people who do!

Clients also love seeing that you have the ability to “bring a design to life” since many struggle to understand a flat, 2-D floor plan.

Hand Sketching / Illustration Skills

Can you hand sketch? Paint? Clients and employers alike love this skillset so show it off! (And for the record, I’m jealous!)

A sped-up sketching video showing your process would be fantastic in addition to the final sketch to feature on your website and social media.

Construction Details

Construction details - this goes hand-in-hand with drafting and rendering and is also a valuable skill.

Even though you can’t officially stamp the plans, demonstrating that you’ve had exposure to what goes into a clear detail is important - from effective use of line weights to call outs. Design firms value that skillset for sure.

Finally - Repurpose Your Content

No matter what you do, be sure to repurpose your content!

Any and all of what goes on your Portfolio page needs to be repurposed on social media - Instagram, Pinterest, Tiktok, LinkedIn - whatever platform(s) of choice. Make sure all of your content is working hard doing double or triple duty for you.

Helpful Interior Design Portfolio Tools

Here’s what I use for portfolio building:

Canva - my favorite graphic design tool. Since I’m not a graphic designer, it does all that I need only much faster than Adobe products, which are made for pros and therefore have alllll the bells and whistles. I happily pay for the Canva Pro membership which gives me access to their easy background remover tool (great for mood boards) plus a slew of other pro options.

Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign - my traditional go-tos which I still use almost daily, but many tasks I used to do in Adobe I now do in Canva.

Pinterest - great for quick mood boards or assembling ideas for design projects.

Squarespace - their dedicated Portfolio page sections with different, customizable layout options makes portfolio design fool-proof.

Check out my 10 post series on starting a design business. Start here:

How To Start An Interior Design Business [10 Key Steps]

New to Squarespace? You can sign up for a free trial, and I can even get you a discount! Use code GREENHOUSE10 to save 10% off your first year.

I hope you found these ideas for putting together a portfolio when you’re just starting out helpful. Like I said, I’ve absolutely been there, so I thought it would be a great topic to cover. What’s been your biggest challenge in creating your portfolio? Leave a comment below and let me know.

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If you have any questions or comments, please drop me a note below. Be sure to check back for my response (I always respond) since no notification is sent.