How to Make a Stunning Squarespace Portfolio Website
Put out you stellar portfolio online
In today's digital age, your online presence is your business card. Whether you're an artist, a designer, a photographer, or a professional looking to showcase your work, a stunning portfolio website can help you leave a lasting impression on potential customers.
And luckily, you don't need to be a tech wizard or a coding genius to create a website that wows. With Squarespace, you can craft a portfolio website that's as unique as your business.
Creating a portfolio on Squarespace is easy and convenient, and today, we’ll show you how to go about it. We’ll also check out some awesome portfolio websites built on Squarespace so you can draw inspiration from them and get started.
Let’s dive in!
How to Make a Portfolio on Squarespace
Creating a portfolio page on Squarespace is quite simple. You only need to follow a couple of steps and let your creative juices flow. Let’s quickly go over the process.
Choose and customize a template
When it comes to creating a portfolio website on Squarespace, you've got all the design tools you need right at your fingertips. Squarespace offers a wide array of free templates you can choose from.
If you're looking for a good starting point, though, you’ll want to check out the Portfolios category in the template store on Squarespace. These templates are tailor-made for showcasing your work and inviting visitors to explore. You can click 'Preview' on any template that catches your eye to get a better look at it or select 'Start With' to use that template as your foundation and get to work.
Another option is using a premium template by a Squarespace designer for a more unique, personalized feel. We have created a Premium Squarespace 7.1 Indie Studio with photographers, artists, event planners, and other visual businesses in mind. It has Portfolio and Galleries pages for you to showcase your work. Muted colors, golden tones & geometric accents will help you create a refined & luxurious brand.
Either way, you can customize every element of your template so that it suits your brand’s style. On the Squarespace editor, you can change the colors and fonts of the template, as well as add and remove sections as needed. This is where you have to get creative and leverage Squarespace’s features to create the look and feel you want for your portfolio website.
2. Add your content
Once your Squarespace portfolio website looks exactly how you want it, you’ll need to start adding your content — a.k.a., the work you want to show off. Squarespace websites can display photographs, illustrations, or designs, as well as text-based work, videos, and much more.
Let’s suppose you’re building an art portfolio on Squarespace. In this case, the main methods for displaying your work are portfolio pages, gallery sections, and image blocks:
Portfolio pages. Portfolio pages have a two-tier structure: a landing page and sub-pages. The landing page shows sub-pages as featured images or text links in a grid or hover layout, making them a great way to organize sets of photos, drawings, or other visual projects.
Gallery sections. Gallery sections allow you to display a set of images on a page in a variety of layouts, as well as to add image descriptions and clickthrough links. They are ideal for grouping images by subject, theme, or series, and they can be added to any type of page or to portfolio sub-pages.
Image blocks. You can use image blocks to add single images in a variety of layouts, which is great for when you want to highlight individual images or get creative with text placement and styling. Image blocks don’t automatically display in cohesive layouts, so you can arrange them however you want.
Now, what about writing portfolios on Squarespace? If you're creating a writer's portfolio or presenting text-based work, you might not want to include images on your site. In that case, there are lots of ways to add text content to your site. Here are the most versatile options:
Layout pages. Layout pages are blank or pre-built pages where you can create custom layouts of text, forms, and other common page features with drag-and-drop blocks. Layout pages are a great choice for non-visual portfolios because they grant you the freedom to get creative with the page elements and display your content however you want.
Portfolio pages. Portfolio pages can come in handy for a writer’s portfolio on Squarespace as well, as they allow you to create a text-centric landing page. You can add and customize a sub-page for each sample of your written work and then add new sub-pages as you continue to create.
Blog pages. On Squarespace, you can easily add a blog page to serve as a landing page for your written content. You can link out to samples of your work by setting up a blog page and then adding individual posts for each piece of content you want to display.
As you can see, regardless of the kind of content you want to share, Squarespace has a ton of features that can help you create a gorgeous portfolio website.
3. Include About and Contact sections
Although it’s nice to get your work out there and show it to the world in a nice, aesthetic way, it’s also important to remember the ultimate goal of a portfolio website: Gaining visibility and — hopefully— connecting with potential customers.
So, after you’re done customizing your template and adding all your beautiful content, remember to add an About Me section and a Contact page. That way, visitors can learn a little bit more about you and your experience, and they can reach out to you with a couple of clicks if they think you might be the right fit.
Great Squarespace Portfolio Examples
To help you kick-start your project, we’ve curated a short list of some of the best Squarespace portfolio websites out there. These examples show just how versatile the platform can be and how easy it is to build a great Squarespace portfolio. Let’s jump right in!
RyuCreative
RyuCreative is a boutique-style marketing agency with a pretty unique Squarespace portfolio. The homepage welcomes visitors with randomly spread images that immediately highlight the creative side of the business.
Also, their portfolio page is structured a bit differently than most agencies. They have a landing page for each of their services, and each uses a different but beautiful design template with high-quality, on-brand images and short descriptions.
2. Lisa Maltby
Lisa Maltby is a bold and comical illustrator and artist who has built her website on Squarespace, including a portfolio page. Her illustrations are unevenly arranged in a three-column layout over a white background that makes the colors pop.
This is a great example of how Squarespace can host an image-heavy portfolio in an elegant and efficient way that truly makes the work stand out.
3. Shawn Weston
Shawn Weston is an expert in UX design, illustration, and writing. His portfolio website boasts a minimalist design, with an easy-to-read font combination and a simple gray and black color palette.
This is a great example of how Squarespace can accommodate different types of creatives and professionals because the website includes a UX portfolio, an illustration portfolio, and a print portfolio, each with very distinct characteristics and needs.
4. Scott Snyder
Scott Snyder is a product photographer with a sleek, minimalistic photography portfolio website on Squarespace. They showcase their best photos with plenty of negative space on the homepage, and visitors can find details about each project by clicking on the photo.
Apart from leveraging the homepage to show their work, they have a separate portfolio page that displays more samples in a simple but very effective two-column layout.
5. Mindy Nguyen
Mindy Nguyen is a visual artist and designer who helps brands with identity, web design, and more. Her homepage includes a short bio with an awesome font, effective copy, and cool animations.
If you scroll down, you’ll find her online portfolio. Each project is represented with an image and some brief information about her work. They all include a link where visitors can find further information. Her portfolio is set up very neatly with negative space, proper visual hierarchy, and emojis that add a bit of flair to it.
Using a Squarespace Template for a Portfolio
If you’re still wondering whether using a Squarespace template to build a portfolio is the right move, we can safely say it is! Squarespace portfolio templates, whether free or premium, offer a lot of flexibility and empower creatives and professionals to build an online presence in a matter of clicks.
To get started, head over to Squarespace’s template library and pick one that better suits your needs. Or you can check out Applet Studio’s templates for a more personalized, unique website that fits your brand like a glove.
