Freelance designers are an important asset to us here at Inkd. During busy times, when we find ourselves under a mountain of overflow design work, we look to hire a few designers to help us get through the backlog. Because of this, we tend to go through a ton of online design portfolios. To a designer looking for prospective work, your online portfolio is your most effective tool to land a design job. Above all else, employers want to see what you are capable of design-wise, and whether your style fits the company or gig. Your portfolio is the first impression you make with a potential employer.

Taking this into consideration, it’s mind-numbing how many badly designed, badly organized, and just plain ugly looking online portfolios we come into contact with. So we thought we’d help all you would-be freelancers out there with a list of  60 things that employers hate to see when looking through an online portfolio:

• Don’t Use Tiny Viewing Windows: We want to be able to actually see your work easily and clearly. If you need a magnifying glass to view your site, its probably not going to make an impression.

• Lay off the Flash: We get it. You know flash. Having too many flash based elements makes your site confusing and difficult to navigate.

• Don’t Add Audio: An 8-bit rendition of “Drop it Like Its Hot” playing in the background of your portfolio doesn’t help highlight your design skills, and neither do popping, clicking, wooshing, cha-chinging links or graphics.

• Be Selective With Your Work: Exercise restraint in the work examples you showcase, a potential employer is not going to go through your life’s design work. Choose the best examples of your work and display them clearly.

• Avoid Pop Up Windows: When reviewing a portfolio employers want to see a variety of work, in order to get a feel. Making images open in a pop up slows gets in the way of flipping through your work easily.

• Make Sure your Site Showcases Your Work and Not You: Go easy on the lengthy bios and opinions on movies. Save those for your blog. Your portfolio is about your professional creative potential, and not necessarily your personal likes and dislikes.

• Test Your Site in Multiple Browsers: Make sure your site looks the same in several different browsers. If a site is broken or incomplete, many employers won’t try loading it in another browser, they’ll just move on to the next portfolio.

• PDF Attachments Suck: No one wants to really download anything, much less a pdf of your portfolio. Upload it if you must, and make sure your attachments are 1MB or less.

• Don’t Be Overly Whimsical: Remember your portfolio is a face to your professional presence as a graphic designer.

• Avoid Using Contact Forms: Don’t purposely obfuscate your contact info. Your portfolio markets your services, and if someone wants to hire you, they want to be able to contact you directly.

• Be Clear About your Skills and Capabilities: Make sure you are reflecting your skills accurately. If you are a graphic designer that doesn’t do web, or an illustrator, or strictly print design, say so. Don’t make employers guess or assume your potential.

• Overly Animated Navigation is obnoxious: If a user has to chase down a bouncing ball onscreen, click it, and shoot it into an animated hoop just to view a section of a site, chances are an employer will be distracted from your work, not to mention already annoyed.

• Clip Art? Really? Avoid using clip art or obvious stock Vector illustrations in your site design.

• Facebook is not a Design Portfolio: Again you want to convey professionalism with your portfolio. Avoid using social Media sites like Facebook, Myspace, Picasa, and DeviantArt.

• Make Sure Your Site Loads Quickly: Portfolios that don’t load or take too long are not going to get looked at. Plain and simple.

• Don’t be “currently updating:” If your site isn’t ready to be viewed in full, don’t leave it up, and don’t apply for any gigs until it is complete.

• Don’t use a million fonts: Make sure your site’s copy is easy to read.

• Don’t use overly Bright/Vibrant Background Colors or Images: Remember your portfolio is about your work. You  want it to stand out, and a distracting background can hinder that.

• Explain Your Role in Each Design: Make sure you indicate what exactly you did for a project. If you include a client list, also be sure to list what you delivered to each.

• Animated Gifs: The 90′s are over, dude.

• Stock WordPress Themes: Avoid them. Make your site your own somehow.

• Organize Your Work By Deliverables. Not by Project: An employer is generally looking for a specific type of design work whether it be logos, packaging, or illustration. Organizing by these deliverable types makes things easy to find.

• Make it Easy To Scroll Through Your Work: For each example of work opening and closing a window is clunky. Go for interfaces that allow a user to seamlessly scroll through collections of work.

• HTML iFrames: Look Amateurish. Don’t use em.

• Optimize Images for your site: Make sure your images are properly scaled and sized. DON’T EDIT THEM IN HTML! DO IT IN A IMAGE EDITING PROGRAM!!

• One Picture of Yourself is Plenty: Save the head shots for your modeling career.

• Check your Grammar: I can haz spellcheck?

• Emoticons: OMG! Like So I heard from my bff Jamie that emoticons are totally used by preteens. :-0

• Be Upfront About your Availability: If you are not currently taking on projects make clear that your aren’t.

• Have a Complete Site: No 404 errors, broken links, or missing alt tags. Also make sure your rudimentary SEO bases are covered.

• Don’t Pro-Offer Your Rate: You want to be able to negotiate your compensation per project. Having a set or base rate on your portfolio may allow you to be undercut.

• Have a Professional Email: JustinBieberGroupie393@yahoo.com is not one of these.

• Queue Loading Large Images: Putting all your images in one place? Allow users to scroll through your work by using javascript to lead your images in order.

• Fine Artist? Painter? Don’t title your site “Graphic Designer.”

• Buttons Are Not a design Project: Just make sure they work.

• Random, Unrelated Images: Make sure you are clear in what you want to represent about yourself and your work, and make sure your portfolio images are conducive to that.

• Gigantic Social Network Icons: Employers don’t want to poke you or play Farmville. A small link would have sufficed, no?

• All photos and No Design? Hate to break it to you: You’re a photographer, not a Graphic Designer.

• Woodgrain: Trite. Your portfolio isn’t a cabin. Do something more creative please.

• Moderate your Comments: If using a site like WordPress, be sure to moderate your comments.

• Your Design “Philosophy:” Interesting, but keep it short. We’re not looking for Thus Spoke Zarathustra here.

• Education: Be sure to flaunt that ‘ol diploma you spent years acquiring! It makes you look more credible.

• Links To Your Online Stores: Pushing a visitor to buy a coffee mug from your CafePress store looks tacky.

• Canned Code and Java Snippets: Most canned DHTML and java effects from freeware sites (such as site counters, etc.) aren’t very slick.  Use with care.

• No Links? How is Google gonna find you without backlinks? Use your SEO skills and market yourself! Don’t go overboard though, making a user have to swim through a sea of links to get to your content.

• Have a unified Theme: Don’t get all “artiste” on every page. Be consistent and stick to a theme.

• Make sure your work isn’t Bipolar: Yes you want to show versatility, but you also want a prospective employer to get a sense of your style.

• Show Current work: Your illustration of stonewashed jeans from the 80′s is probably due for an update. Plus people get better as time goes on, so show us your best!

• Image maps are not a website: If you can’t code, get a coder to slice your images.  Don’t make each page a huge image.  It happens folks.  Trust us.  We’ve seen it all.

• Mandating Plugins: Please don’t make us download Silverlight to view your site. Please.

• Consider a Grid Layout: There are far too many portfolio sites that look like a pile of dirty laundry scattered all over some dorm room. Organize!

• Drop Shadows, Bevels and Embossing: If we see any of those three things on your front page we’re not hiring you.  Sorry.

• Ad clutter: Fine, but don’t overdo it.

• Sites That Are Too Narrow: 800×600 is your confined working space?  Step into 2010 with us please.

• Blinking: Nuff said. Nothing on your site should have a blink tag.

• Location: Some employers want to know where you are working from whether its Brooklyn or Ulan Bator. Don’t be afraid to let them know!

• Distorted Typefaces: It’s all too common: A perfectly nice typeface stretched and smashed beyond recognition in order to look unique. Don’t do it.

• Minimalism: Don’t go too far. We do want to see your work, not artistic negative space.

• Having Your Content Below the Fold: Be sure to test your site in several different resolutions, so that your work isn’t pushed below the initial visible field.

• Have an actual Site!!! Equally mind boggling as the things listed above are the applications we receive that have no portfolio link at all. These get deleted immediately.

If you can avoid these all too common mistakes you may actually have a shot at not infuriating anyone that looks at your portfolio. Oh yeah, and a shot at actually getting hired too!