A web design portfolio expresses your branding, personality, and skill. It’s likely the first hub an interested viewer finds, so you want to make a great impression to encourage them to contact you. 

Read on to discover what a web design portfolio should include and the 10 portfolio examples that create an excellent first impression.

Why do web designers need a website portfolio?

You can only say and show so much on networking platforms like LinkedIn. Your portfolio does the rest of the pitch-work for you, highlighting your design skills and social proof. You might use this page to emphasize your proficiency in various design disciplines, like graphic, interactive, and UI/UX design. You could also include case studies that show how your work helped companies achieve strategic goals like improved click-through rates.

Your website is a controlled environment where you can experiment with new techniques, showing your commitment to staying current with modern design trends. In a field like web design, where markets and demands constantly change, having the ability to innovate significantly boosts your appeal to prospective clients and employers.

What to include on your design portfolio website

A web design portfolio website must represent you and your work. The color scheme, fonts, typography, layout, and images should emphasize your personal brand throughout several key pages.

Homepage

Your homepage should immediately hook potential clients with eye-catching visuals and project work that sparks curiosity. This page is also where you’ll introduce yourself, whether with graphics, a photo, or fun animations. Whatever you choose, make sure it represents what sets you apart from the rest.

If you have a design niche, like 3D effects or interactive web pages, make that skill evident immediately.

About

On this page you can go into personal details, discussing your background, working style, and professional experience. Include links to social media pages that provide more information about you or your online work, like LinkedIn, Behance, or Dribbble.

Portfolio

The portfolio page highlights your most impressive projects. Select a diverse selection showing off various skills across the industries you specialize in. Provide a description of each, covering your key role in the project, the challenges you solved, the skills you used, and your thinking behind the strategy. That way, potential clients can see what you excel at and how you approach your work.

Contact

The contact page often meshes with the “About” page, but either way, providing contact information is necessary so potential clients can get in touch. 

If you want to list your available services and rates, this page is the ideal place to do it so clients can check the costs before reaching out.

How to make your web design portfolio stand out

Yes — a portfolio is often the visitor’s introduction to your work. But it shouldn’t be your first introduction to them. 

Before filling out a template or building your portfolio online, consider the types of clients and brands you want to work with. This data influences which skills and experiences you’ll highlight.

For example, if you want to attract SaaS website clients, clean, modern designs with interactive elements might be more appealing. But if your target audience is local businesses, designs with local cultural elements could be more persuasive. Strategically curating your portfolio improves its relevance to the viewer and highlights your versatility as a designer.

10 of the best web design portfolio website examples

Here are the 10 best portfolio websites covering different skill sets, personalities, and specialties in web design.

1. Ivette Felix Uy

Brooklyn-based product designer Ivette Felix Uy's landing page showcases six projects, working well as a homepage for a designer with a niche skill set. The cream-colored background makes her colorful imagery stand out, and the case study structure means those quickly scrolling through get an idea of what she offers while more time-invested visitors can learn more.

2. Empathy template

This Empathy template by Ty Hughey is a solid base for an agency or studio web design portfolio. With consistent layouts and built-in mobile responsiveness, Empathy delivers bold, beautiful, and professional design. 

Scrolling through the template reveals sections where you can add high-quality images. Each image pairs with a box to add copy and a title so you can describe the projects and draw potential clients further into the site. 

With its built-in pages for your projects and services, you can transform this template into a highly customized personal portfolio.

3. Milli

Milli is a creative design agency with impressive skills and credentials, having worked with high-profile brands like Microsoft, Meta, Netflix, and Red Bull. This portfolio is an immersive browsing experience, containing rectangles for each section and moving text around all the boxes. Each side focuses on different text streams:

• The right adds personality to the site by discussing Godzilla Minus One
• The top says, “We're an award-winning, purpose-driven, creative agency, but you can just call us Milli.”
• The left repeats “Have you considered instead of whatever you do pursuing the art of fingertutting? Well, have you?”
• The bottom text lists skills like video production, web design, and branding

The key sections Work, Connect, About, and Community come to life with a yellow highlight and enlarged text when hovered over. These microinteractions encourage visitors to click on the grids and learn more about Milli.

4. Colin Moy

Designer Colin Moy created a bold, immersive web design portfolio showing his talents. The website itself is part of Colin’s work samples — he even encourages you to clone it and dig into the details.

Colin’s portfolio greets visitors with a visual trick, replacing letters in his name with eyes. Clicking on those eyes activates dark mode and triggers an animation, with the eyes becoming cat-like slits. The eyes keep watching as you navigate Colin’s site, swapping the Os in About, Portfolio, and Contact to expandable sections you can click to see more. It's an excellent strategy for engaging visitors and encouraging them to explore.

5. MN STUDIO

MN STUDIO's portfolio highlights founder Mark Noble's background in motion design and web development. The studio gravitates toward projects that involve animations and movement, hoping potential clients do as well.

As you scroll and hover, animations reveal past projects sliding across the screen and encouraging clicks. The interactivity emphasizes the agency’s skill set. Every page includes movement, from horizontal sliding text to popup images and interactive elements. These immerse site visitors in the content, giving MN STUDIO more time to show off and sell its services.

6. Ali Saeed

‍Ali Saeed is a Kuwait-based graphic designer and Webflow developer. He works primarily with startups and corporations on web design, branding, and presentations, as highlighted by the interactive case studies and insights neatly stacked next to each other on the homepage.

Each project sample develops a gradient, changes color, or moves as you hover over it. This subtle animation brings the active element to the fore, encouraging you to click and read more. 

7. You X portfolio template

‍You X is a web design portfolio template from BRIX templates. It’s fully customizable and offers About, Portfolio, and ecommerce pages. You can also access an editable Figma file after buying the template.

This portfolio website template is the perfect blank canvas. It follows current design trends regarding typography, whitespace, and general UX design portfolio-building while allowing users to make it their own. Plus, the “Pages” option in the navbar offers utility web pages like a style guide, 404 error pages, and password-protected pages.

8. Side Scroller template

‍Aaron Grieve's Side Scroller template offers a unique presentation approach: scrolling horizontally rather than vertically. Scrolling brings new content into view from the right rather than from the bottom of the page, creating an immersive experience, like turning a brochure’s pages. 

This template is fully responsive and reviewed for accessibility by Webflow's Audit panel. 

9. Eve Kayser

‍Eve Kayser's web design portfolio immediately catches the eye with gradient effects on the logo and either side of the screen in a greenish-teal color combination. As you scroll, a luminescent navigation slider to the left guides you through Eve’s “About me” section, with each point revealing itself as you move further down.

Colors start to pop when you reach the “Work” section, highlighting all the satisfied customers Eve created websites for before transitioning back to teal tones. Not only does this layout effectively show Eve’s clientele, but it also maintains a consistent visual identity.

The floating menu at the top also links to each section, skipping the page scroll to deliver a quick look at Eve’s graphic design portfolio. This cut-to-the-chase approach takes potential clients to the samples to satisfy their curiosity and speed up the site experience.

10. Karlis Kah

Before scrolling, you’ll immediately notice Karlis Kah’s expertise lies in interactive, animated, and motion designs. The portfolio’s homepage has a 3D embossed “KAH” above a clean white “KAH,” seamlessly combining minimalism with maximalism.

A quick scroll highlights a brief “About me” section before moving to Karlis’ prominent projects. Hovering over any project brings up a square-style animation, providing a glimpse of each campaign without disturbing other design elements. This theme continues if you click on the “Misc” button in the navbar at the top, which takes you to a mood board of colorful squares.

Finally, bold “Let’s Talk” text repeats itself at the bottom of the page, acting as a compelling CTA for anyone interested in hiring Karlis.

Feeling inspired? Create your own portfolio with Webflow

A well-designed portfolio isn't just a collection of your best work — it communicates who you are and why potential clients should choose you among others. If you want to create a portfolio that reflects your style, explore Webflow’s visual web development platform, or use readymade templates to save time.

You can also visit the Webflow blog to learn what makes design portfolios unique or find more examples of personal websites and graphic designs to inspire your own.