Website Portfolio vs Interview portfolio

[Mr Man]

Hello everyone,

A quick question.
I have been sorting out my homepage recently and have been looking at other concept artist and illustrator sites to give me a rough idea on the structure and quantity of work.
Generally I hear that a portfolio should be about 10-15 images, a less is more approach. However I have noticed on the majority of artists websites that there is quite alot of content.
I was wondering what everyones thoughts are on this. Do you treat your homepage as a base for lots of work and then when applying for a job narrow down the images that you are going to present?

Cheers.

Rich

[QueenGwenevere]

It depends on you, the nature of your work, and the purpose of your website...

If you haven't done much pro work yet, you'll probably want to keep it streamlined - just show the best pieces. Pros often want to show off the range of finished jobs they've done, though, so there tends to be more work on a pro site, and more work keeps getting added over time. (Though of course it depends on the individual or company and how they want to present themselves.)

For me, I do a pretty diverse range of different kinds of jobs, so I've tried to divide my site into sections and subsections, with maybe a dozen or more things per section/subsection, so people can go straight to the work that's relevant to them. I'm currently revamping that entire site, though (it hasn't been updated in a few years.) What I'm working on now still has sections and subsections, but I'm breaking them out a little differently and trying to make it more streamlined and easier for people to find the stuff they'd be most interested in. I'm also setting up a kind of slideshow of highlights on the main page, to give a "best of" overview and hopefully draw people in. (The front-page slideshow would be the equivalent of a traditional "less is more" portfolio.)

When I used to go around actually presenting physical portfolios at interviews, what I would do is have a basic 12 - 20 piece book that I'd show to start off with, and then I'd have a few other things in my bag that I could pull out if the client was interested (portfolios of alternate styles, a big fat collection of sketches, miscellaneous cool things, whatever.) Then if the client liked the first portfolio and said "got anything else?" I'd pull out the next portfolio... and the next... and the next... This got some pretty positive responses, and was rather fun.