Why This Creative Has Built Nearly 1,000 Portfolios

When Camilla Ciappina, now an associate creative director at McCann New York, started at the Miami Ad School in her native Brazil, she already considered portfolios a great source of inspiration. Soon however, she came to realise that they were even more than that - they are the tickets to jobs in advertising.

Taking the feedback she received from her own employment search in New York, Camilla started ‘Pimp My Portfolio’ (originally titled ‘Pimp My Pasta’, the Portuguese word for portfolio). The side-hustle helps creatives improve (or ‘pimp’) their portfolios - and in-turn, hopefully raise their chances of catching an employer’s interest.

“I saw the necessity of people needing help to build a website; they didn’t know where to start, which templates to use, or how to lay out the presentation,” says Camilla. “So I created something I could do on the side, just to keep myself busy and help people here and there.”

After a three month-long job search in the city, it was a challenge to build people’s trust in her at first, as a junior art director ‘pimping’ creative directors’ portfolios. “I still remember one post on Fishbowl [a social media platform for professionals], where someone said I was ‘just a chick with a side hustle’. And hey, it took a few clients to believe in me and now I’ve almost reached 1,000 sites pimped since 2016.” 

This demand exists because building a portfolio is tough - even for the most creative people in the industry. This is something Camilla learned early on when a creative director ‘trashed’ her own, admittedly “very rough”, portfolio during an interview post graduation. “He said to erase it and go for a gap year to find inspiration and references. But that was not a possibility for me - I needed a job.” 

Feeling frustrated, Camilla deleted her whole site and started from scratch. After searching for references from her peers and putting together a lot of spec work, she refreshed her site and was able to land her first job as an art assistant at Havas Worldwide. 

“For people who are starting their ad journey, we are so fixated on having produced work, but at entry-level, they won’t expect you to have produced work. They are looking for a set of skills that you can bring to the team. They will teach you, you will learn. Show all you got, from illustrations to how you treat type. That’s what I did, and it works!”

Initially helping her fellow Brazilian colleagues, ‘Pimp My Portfolio’ began to spread by word of mouth, then via referrals from recruiters and on social media sites like LinkedIn and Fishbowl. Nowadays, most of her clients come through referrals and the workshops she’s given at Miami Ad School, Marist College and Ad House, which opened doors for her to present classes on the topic at Cannes Lions, One Show Creativity Week, Pratt Institute, Savannah College and more. She's even gone on to publish a book on the topic.

“I get requests even when I don’t post,” says Camilla. “It’s amazing, it makes me so happy to see how far it’s gone. And I am truly grateful to everyone that recommends ‘Pimp My Portfolio’. 

After eight years of ‘pimping’ hundreds of portfolios, Camilla lays out the key features and design choices that she believes contribute to a really successful portfolio: 

• Quality over quantity: “Don’t showcase all your work. Show the work you are most proud of that presents a different set of skills that you can offer. I sometimes see sites that have 30+ projects, and that’s not necessary. You can show your expertise in 15 projects or less. The more you add, it gets confusing for the navigation and makes the site heavy to load.”

• Add description to the project pages: “This is very important, it helps to give context to the work. Describe the project, what your role was, and if there were any challenges or results. This needs to be the first thing people see when they open the project page. Some creatives leave it for last, but it doesn’t make sense for the flow of the page.”

• Responsive design: “Make it responsive for all screen sizes, especially for mobile. This is very important.”

• Easy-to-navigate: “The navigation bar needs to be on the top the whole time, along with your name, title, and links for the ‘about’ page, work, and resume.”

• Add your title next to your name: “I know this sounds easy and it’s something people do automatically. But people forget to include what their job title is next to their name. This will help creatives and recruiters know your level, and if you are an art director or copywriter, for example.”

When discussing the pitfalls creatives often find themselves in while designing their portfolios, Camilla shares that many beginners often think the work should speak for itself - but fail to pay attention to how the work is presented. “If a portfolio is confusing to navigate and people can’t easily find information, that will make a recruiter jump to another site.”

She adds, “Another common mistake is that they don’t think mobile. Since the pandemic, the number of people seeing a site on mobile has increased significantly, and most of the sites I see are not fit for that. Make your site responsive! One other thing is the lack of supporting assets inside the project pages. Some just add the case study, and again, the recruiters and creatives will not have the time to watch everything. So, having supporting assets to the campaign will help tell the story better.”

To develop her own portfolio creation skills early on in this venture, Camilla taught herself to code with HTML and CSS, and now uses a wide variety of tools, including the templated platforms like Squarespace 7.1, Cargo Collective, Wix, Readymag, Adobe Portfolio, Format, and WordPress, as well as Google Font, Adobe Color, and Typekit. Noting that Squarespace and Wix are people’s favourite sites to use currently, she says that some popular trends are the Parallax effect for thumbnails and background images, and using gifs as thumbnails to “add motion to the site and make people more curious to click on the project pages.” 

She continues, “The portfolio game hasn’t changed much since 2017. There are new platforms and templates, but the presentation of the portfolio itself didn’t change. The biggest change came after the pandemic when more people were working from home. They were always with their phones in hand, so they were checking more sites on mobile. My personal site went from 3% mobile views in 2019, to 43% during the pandemic, for example.” 

Whether it’s a more simple idea, or a complex, vintage circus-themed portfolio - yes, Camilla has been asked for that before - she says that one piece of advice for all creatives remains evergreen: “You ALWAYS have to update your portfolio.” 

“You may not be looking for a job, but there’s always a job looking for you - and your portfolio needs to be ready,” she says. “I have clients who come to me two days before an interview asking to revamp their sites because they haven’t done so in five years. Don’t make that mistake! Have it ready!”

As well as her own site, Camilla recommends resources like Portfolio Night with the One Show, the ‘sites in use’ previews on the templated website platforms that show what others are doing, and LinkedIn as a tool to “professionally stalk” others’ online portfolios and get inspiration. Not to mention Adobe Color to select a colour palette for the site, and pages like Site Inspire, One Page Love and Awwwards for inspiration and references.

“For me,” she adds, “they can always reach out through the site at www.pimpmyportfolio.us.”