Journal
The portfolio that
wins commissions.
Most portfolios are a sequence of attractive rooms with no problem in sight — which shows taste, and taste is table stakes on any shortlist.
Portfolios fail by being decoration
The standard interior design portfolio is a sequence of well-lit rooms with a project name above them. It is pleasant and it is nearly useless, because it contains no problem — and without a problem there is no visible evidence of judgement, only of taste.
Taste is table stakes. Every studio on the shortlist has taste, or they would not be on it. What separates the studio that gets the commission is proof that when something went wrong, someone made a good decision about it.
The single most valuable sentence
For every project, write one sentence naming the constraint and one naming the decision.
A structural column sat 600 mm into the living room and could not move, so the media unit was built around it and the column became the edge of the seating zone rather than an obstruction in the middle of it.
That sentence does three things no image can. It proves there was a problem. It proves you solved it deliberately. And it gives a prospective client a way to imagine you handling their awkward flat. It takes four minutes per project and it is the highest-return change available to almost any studio portfolio.
Cut to six to twelve
Every portfolio has a weakest project, and it does more work than the strongest one — because a client reads it as the floor of what you produce. Removing the bottom third of a portfolio raises the perceived level of the whole practice without a single new project.
Keep the projects you want more of, not the ones that were hardest or most recent. A portfolio is a statement of intent, not a chronology.
Sequence in walk order
Most project pages order images by how good they are: hero first, then progressively weaker. That is the order a designer sees them in. A client experiences a space in a sequence — arrival, turn, notice a material, sit down — and a project page that follows that order reads as a place rather than as a gallery.
| Position | Image | Doing what |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Establishing wide, full width | The room that justified publishing the project |
| 2 | Scope line, one sentence | Type, size, duration — clients scan for their own situation |
| 3 | The constraint sentence | The proof there was a problem |
| 4–7 | Rooms in walk order | Arrival, turn, next space |
| 8 | One material close-up | Where a design-literate client decides about craft |
| 9 | Plan or sketch, if it exists | Evidence of spatial thinking rather than styling |
| 10 | Enquiry link | Interest peaks here, not on a contact page |
Consistency over provenance
Studios worry about whether images are renders or photographs. Clients do not, at least not in the way studios expect — what they notice is inconsistency. A page mixing a graded commissioned photograph, a raw render and a phone shot taken on site reads as a practice that does not control its own output.
Pick one standard and grade everything to it. If a photography budget exists, cover two or three projects completely rather than one image each across eight.
The website portfolio and the feed are different objects
The feed is a qualifying instrument — it is scanned in seconds by someone checking whether you are consistent. The website portfolio is read slowly by someone already considering hiring you, and it can carry text, plans and detail that would be wasted in a grid.
Using the same crops and captions in both is the most common shortcut, and it means one of the two is always doing the wrong job. The feed's own rules are here.
Questions studios ask
How many projects should be in an interior design portfolio?
Six to twelve, shown in depth. A client is not auditing your total output; they are looking for evidence that you have handled something resembling their situation. Beyond roughly twelve projects each additional one dilutes rather than adds, because the reader stops reading and starts scrolling — and the weakest project in a portfolio does more to set expectations than the strongest one.
Should I include concept projects I was never paid for?
Only if they are labelled as concepts and only if they show something your built work cannot. An unbuilt scheme is legitimate evidence of thinking, and for a young studio it may be the only evidence available. What damages a portfolio is presenting concepts ambiguously, because a client who later realises a project was never built will question everything else on the page.
What makes an interior design portfolio actually convert?
One sentence per project naming the constraint you designed around. Portfolios are almost universally a sequence of attractive images with no problem in sight, which reads as decoration. Naming the structural column, the low beam or the impossible brief converts the same images into evidence of judgement, and judgement is what a client is paying for.
Do I need professional photography for an interior design portfolio?
For the website, one consistent standard matters more than professional origin. A set of well-graded renders reads better than a mixture of commissioned photography and phone shots taken at handover. If a budget exists for photography, spend it on two or three projects thoroughly rather than one image each across eight.
Should the portfolio show before-and-after images?
Where the original condition was photographed, yes — before-and-after is one of the few formats where the value of the work is legible to a non-designer. The mistake is showing an unflattering wide 'before' against a styled 'after'; matching the camera position makes the comparison credible rather than promotional.
Related
We will tell you what to cut
Send the portfolio. We will come back with which projects to remove, which to expand, and the constraint sentence for the three strongest — free, before anything is priced.
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