A studio portfolio should help a prospective client understand the work, the team's role and how to get in touch. Building D1S1 gives us many examples to browse, but a website scan cannot tell us which portfolios generate more enquiries.
Reviewed September 4, 2026. This is editorial guidance, not a conversion study. The original version gave unsupported mobile-traffic percentages, an “ideal” number of projects and claims about which studios convert best. Those claims have been removed. Apply the checklist to your own audience and measure the result.
Lead with a clear outcome
Show the finished identity, launched website or packaging early in a case study. Give the visitor enough context to understand what it is, who it was for and what your team contributed.
Include process where it explains a decision or demonstrates a capability a prospective client needs. Its usefulness depends on the project and audience; there is no reason to hide all process by default.
Choose projects that explain your offer
There is no measured optimum of eight or twelve projects in our dataset. Choose enough work to show the capabilities you want to be hired for, and remove repetitions that add little information.
For each project, make the essentials easy to find:
- The client and project brief.
- Your team's scope and contribution, including collaborators where relevant.
- Well-sized images with useful captions and alternative text.
- The reasoning behind important decisions.
- Outcomes you can substantiate and have permission to share.
A thumbnail grid can help someone scan the work. A detailed case study can help them assess fit. Give visitors an easy route between those two levels.
Measure the browsing experience
A scraper's response time is not a browser load time, and HTML size excludes the images, scripts, fonts and videos that shape the experience. Our technology scan does not supply visitor performance or abandonment rates.
Test representative pages on a phone and a slower connection. Use browser measurements and, where available, real-user data. Google's Web Vitals guidance distinguishes loading, responsiveness and visual stability through LCP, INP and CLS.
Serve appropriately sized, compressed images; check the visual result rather than avoiding compression altogether. Defer media that is not immediately needed, while keeping the leading project image easy to load.
Check that navigation and case content remain usable with reduced motion, a keyboard and touch input. Animation should support the work without making basic browsing difficult.
Make contact easy to find
Give prospective clients a clear route to an email address or enquiry form from the project pages. State the kind of work you take on so that people can judge whether their enquiry fits.
Check the contact flow on both desktop and mobile. We do not have a measured mobile share for the studios in the directory; use your own analytics to understand your visitors.
Explain what you do in plain language
Describe your services concretely. “We design brand identities for food and beverage companies” gives a visitor more to work with than abstract claims about transformation or impact.
Credit the team and collaborators accurately. Distinguish a project's goals from outcomes that have actually been measured. Ask someone unfamiliar with the work to read a case study and explain back what you contributed.
Keep a useful record of the work
Use your own website as the primary reference for project descriptions, credits and contact information. Social platforms can point people toward that record.
Review old contact details, broken project links and missing credits periodically. Publication frequency alone does not tell us whether a studio is active or successful; keep the information useful and accurate at the cadence your practice can maintain.
Check the technical basics
- Serve pages over HTTPS and check that links and forms work.
- Test narrow screens, keyboard navigation, readable type and alternative text.
- Set page titles, descriptions and social sharing images for individual projects.
- Check indexing settings if you want search engines to discover the work.
- Verify contact details and clear paths back to the project index.
Choose a platform around your workflow
The 400-studio technology analysis records WordPress, Webflow, Framer, Next.js and Squarespace among the tools found on studio websites. It does not establish that a particular platform suits larger studios, produces better conversion rates or limits the quality of an established studio's work.
Use the technology directory to find references, then compare the content model, editing workflow and maintenance needs of your own portfolio. A detected tool is one part of that decision.
To evaluate a redesign, define what success means for your studio and measure it consistently: completed enquiries, relevant project views or another outcome tied to your goals. Keep those measurements separate from visual preference and from what a public website scan can observe.