Are you starting to get your portfolio ready to send to clients, and you want to know what you should include or what you shouldn’t include? We’re going to be looking at a few tips for getting your portfolio ready to send to clients.

You want to remember that art directors or the clients that you’re sending your artwork to are busy people. and they may be getting lots and lots of email pitches every single day.

Cover letter

This starts with nailing your cover letter. Obviously, when you’re sending your artwork, you need to have a cover letter that goes along with that. Probably the most important thing to think about when you are creating your cover letter is to make sure that you keep it short, that you keep it to the point, obviously that it’s well-written that you don’t have any spelling errors etc.

You want to remember that art directors or the clients that you’re sending your artwork to are busy people and they’re probably getting lots and lots of emails every single day. If you make your email really long with paragraphs of information, then they’re less likely to actually read it. And your email is more likely to get lost so you really want to make sure that you keep things to the point and you get your information across in a really clear way. That way they know exactly what it is that you’re wanting who you are and how they can also importantly contact you.

Research your client

Now, before you actually get your cover letter together, you want to make sure that you’ve done your research on your potential clients. So you want to know about their business, about what sort of work that they sell and make sure that when you’re sending your work to them, that you’re including work, that is relevant to their business.

How is your work going to fit in with them and what they already sell? You can show them something new that you think will fit into their business, but you want to make sure that you’re not just sending work to people where it’s a completely different sort of artwork that they’d be using because then they’re less likely to say yes to you. So you may want to make sure that it’s evident that you’ve really taken that time to curate your portfolio, to suit them. And that you’re not just sending the same old portfolio to every single client. So you really want to take that time to curate your portfolio to each individual person that you’re sending it to. So that means you need to take the time to really research, see the sort of designs that they currently sell. See where you think you might fit in.

Research your client

Make sure that you take that time to present your work to me impress. That means really just taking time with all of those small little details, you know, making sure if you’ve got artwork on a page that it’s all lined up nicely, that it’s really consistent, that it’s cohesive in the way that you’re presenting it, that you’re using good quality images. Make sure the images aren’t really pixelated and difficult to see. Rushing this step can really let you down because what will happen is your portfolio will get noticed for the wrong reasons. You want to make sure that you take the time to get this right, and you want to make sure that you’ve presented it in a really professional way. That also means that you only want to show your best work too. Even if you don’t feel like you have enough work to show, don’t just feel like you have to add, add, add extra lots of different things that don’t work, you know, by adding designs in just for the sake of it, all it’s going to do is to lower the whole standard of your body of work.

Your artwork

You could send a link to your website, but I would always recommend that you include some JPEG images or PDFs or however you’re attaching your images to the email rather than expecting your client to have to go to your website. 

You want to make it really simple and easy for them to have a quick look at what it is you can do. You can always send them another link to your full portfolio if you have it on your website, but in the email, I would just make it as easy and as simple for them to get an idea of the work that you do. Alos make sure when you include your contact details that they are easily found. And it is a good idea is to include , your name, any of your contact details, like your email, your web address, your Instagram handle, etc.in the footer of each page. cetera. Then they decided they wanted to contact you at a later date it would make it really, really simple and easy for them to be able to do that.

Listen to the podcast episode where we dive in deeper