On not having a portfolio

A small number of design studios have stopped putting their work on their website. They are, by every commercial measure I can find, doing better than the ones that have not.

This is not advice. It is an observation. The pattern is recent enough that I am still working out whether it is causation or correlation.

The studios I am thinking of are small. Two to ten people. Their websites are essentially a single page with a brief paragraph about what the studio does, a list of clients without case studies, a contact email, and a written explanation of what kind of work they take on. No project gallery. No case studies. No client logos in a grid. The work itself, when it appears, appears in newsletters or in talks or in interviews, but not on the studio’s own website.

Why this is working, I think.

Most prospective clients of small studios are referrals. They have already heard about the studio from someone they trust before they look at the website. They are not browsing portfolios. They are looking for confirmation that the studio is real, that it does the kind of work they have been told about, and that it can be reached. A short paragraph and an email do this faster than a portfolio does.

The clients who are browsing portfolios are, in many cases, clients you do not want. They are price-shopping. They are gathering options. They are running an internal procurement process where the studio is one of five being evaluated. Studios that present themselves well to this audience tend to win the kind of work that this audience commissions, which tends to be undifferentiated and underpaid.

A portfolio, as a thing maintained by a small studio, is also expensive. It needs to be kept current. It needs to be redesigned every two or three years to not look dated. Cases need to be photographed and written up. The work that goes into the portfolio is work that does not go into the actual practice.

The studios that have skipped the portfolio have, in effect, made an explicit bet: that their referral network is strong enough to bring in work without one. The studios for whom this bet works tend to share three things. They are at least three years old. They write publicly, in some form, about their practice. They have a small set of clients who would, if asked, recommend them.

This is not a recommendation that every studio remove their portfolio. It is a recommendation that every studio ask, honestly, whether their portfolio is bringing in the work they want, or filling space they think they ought to fill.

A few studios whose websites work well without a traditional portfolio, as references: Bibliothèque, whose site is mostly written argument with the work secondary. Studio Dumbar, where the work is shown but the case-study format is light. Hassan Rahim, who runs the small-studio version of this approach almost in full. The companion piece on case studies that age well covers the alternative for studios that do want to show their work.

For most of the small studios I admire, the answer is the second.