When designing a developer portfolio, your goal is to create a visually appealing and user-friendly site that highlights your skills, projects, and personal brand. Whether you are focusing on frontend develolper portfolio design or a more generalized web developer portfolio, the principles of good design remain the same.
Why Frontend Developer Portfolio Design Matters
As a frontend developer, your portfolio is a reflection of your skills. The design choices you make such as typography, layout, and color scheme should not only be visually appealing but also demonstrate your ability to create clean and efficient user interfaces.
For more insights on how to organize your frontend developer portfolio layout for maximum impact, check out our guide How to Structure an Effective Developer Portfolio. This will help you understand examples of a strategic layout you can use for your own portfolio to effectively lay out your projects, skills, and experience to create a cohesive and engaging portfolio that speaks to visitors.
Design a Web Developer Portfolio with Purpose
Before designing, it is important that you clearly define your web developer portfolio's purpose; this will ultimately affect the approach you take for your layout. For example, a YouTuber who posts coding tutorials has a vastly different purpose for having a developer portfolio than a web developer actively applying to jobs.
Typically, a YouTuber has a personal website as their professional space on the internet, allowing users to navigate to their different socials and view recently uploaded content.
A developer actively applying to jobs having the same content/layout as a YouTuber will not be effective. Instead the developer would want to highlight their projects, skills and experience.
Answer these questions to help reveal your web developer portfolio's purpose:
- Who is the target audience for your developer portfolio?
- Do you want your portfolio to attract potential employers or freelance clients?
- What message do you want to make clear on your web developer portfolio?
- What skills or technologies do you want to highlight in your portfolio?
- Do you want your portfolio to demonstrate your creativity, or technical expertise more prominently?
- What kind of tone do you want to set through your portfolio design?
Typography: Setting the Tone for Your Developer Portfolio
Now that you understand the importance of design for your portfolio and how depending on the context of its purpose can influence the layout of your portfolio, its time to choose your font(s) to use.
A portfolio website should generally only use one to two fonts. This allows you to have flexibility for having important content like titles in a more eye catching font than the content.
Where to find fonts for your web developer portfolio:
The tone of your website will be heavily reliant on the type of font you use. For example if you decide to use Atma as your main font, the site will come off as very playful.
If you are a web developer, typography will not matter as much as it does for a role as a designer, but it is still important to choose a font that conveys the right tone for your developer portfolio.
Fonts that work well for developers:
- Inter
- Roboto
- Lato
- Poppins
Color Scheme: Choosing the right color scheme for your portfolio
Developers find color schemes to be the most difficult task of designing an effective developer portfolio. Knowing what colors complement each other, the psychology of color (e.g., blue is often associated with feelings of trust and reliability), and choosing a color scheme that has high contrast to ensure for accessibility are challenging but with the right resources and information, it becomes much easier to create a color palette for your website.
Quick explanation of colors that compliment each other
Complementary colors are colors, that when paired, cancel each other out effecively producing a grayscale color like white or black. When placed next to each other, they produce the most contrast making it easier for a distinction of text color and background color for a better user experience.
While for most users both examples are readable, to those with low contrast sensitivity would have a much more difficult time trying to read the left example compare to the right.
To effectively avoid having poor contrast between text color and background color it's best to choose the color opposite to the color you first chose on a color wheel.
How to build color scheme + resources
Start by selecting one main color that represents your brand or personality.
Some examples of colors and their evoking emotion:
- Blue: Trust, professionalism
- Green: Growth, creativity, eco-friendliness
- Yellow: Optimism, energy
- Red: Passion, urgency
- Grey: Neutrality, balance
The most common base color blue and grey are safe and professional choices, if you're in a more creative field like designer you may choose a bolder color like green or purple.
The portfolio I am building in this example, I want to make it convey professionalism so its base color will be blue; to be specific it will be #0047AB.
Now that we have the first color (and most important color) of our color scheme for our portfolio, we can use ColorHexa to enter our specific base color hex value to generate color schemes that pair well with our color.
Here is what is generated from ColorHexa
Select a color scheme type
Now that we have generated color schemes, choose the type of color scheme you like best
- Monochromatic: Variations in lightness and saturation of a single color
- Analogous: Colors that are next to each other on the color wheel
- Complementary: Colors that are opposite each other on color wheel. Provides the most contrast and energy
- Triadic: Three colors spaced evenly around the color wheel. This color scheme is balanced yet colorful
For this particular example I want to use Monochromatic color scheme to keep it simple and stick with blue.
Select Neutral Colors
These neutral colors will be used for text and background elements.
From ColorHexa I will choose the second darkest shade of my color #0047AB for my neutral black, and the lightest tint color for #0047AB.
Depending on whether you want a light-theme developer portfolio, or dark-theme would determine how you use these neutral colors.
The color scheme I have generated is simple and you can certainly be more creative for your developer portfolio
Designing homepage heading using example color scheme created
Now that you have a color scheme you can roughly begin to design introductory information for your developer portfolio like your homepage's heading.
Inspiration: Find designs for sections of your developer portfolio
Now that you have your color scheme and font chosen, you are ready to start looking for inspiration; it's important that you don't copy another person's portfolio design as your portfolio is meant to be a professional representation of you.
Resources to find developer portfolio inspiration
- Dribbble - to find inspiration that better suits your developer portfolio, make sure to detail your search query to include your professional title
- webportfolios.dev/portfolios - find developer portfolios uploaded by our community for inspiration
Conclusion
It's important that before diving into designing the other sections that your developer portfolio must have like your projects, skills and experience, make sure that you have your content organized properly. Check out our guide How to Structure an Effective Developer Portfolio to view the standard, and most effective layout, that recruiters want to see on your web developer portfolio.