Nothing, it seems, is more professionally challenging than re-designing your own design portfolio. It’s a perfect storm of conflicting issues — it’s difficult to scope the audience (is it you, other designers, clients?), the stakes are high (it’s most designers’ primary means of marketing), and it must be pitch-perfect in terms of design and content (you’re selling design, so it must be elegant and convincing). Yet the second guessing, stress and frustration that come with most re-design attempts are as cliche as ‘the writer working on his first novel’ syndrome — if design is what I do, why can’t I just do it?

What’s wrong, dude?

For one, my current site horribly out of date — I’ve launched much stronger work that what’s up there currently. While my tagline of “A web design studio” is to the point, it’s so impossibly vague it’s nearly useless (imagine Coke using a new slogan, “a soda beverage”). Lastly, the CMS that manages my portfolio is a clumsy, and I’ve always wanted to make the site dead simple to maintain.

Yourself, a terrible client

Looking at it, all of these issues are straightforward, easily solvable problems, and yet I’ve been the only hold up. Acting as a client, I’ve been incredibly demanding, picky, and selfish. I keep insisting that everything ‘be perfect,’ while not establishing goals that I can meet. Specifically, I’m not approaching this as a solvable problem, one that can be tackled with a solid process. Rather, I’m just designing, willy-nilly, to get inspired and excited about my work. I’m letting my subjective tastes and poor planning ruin my chances of coming up with something successful.

Being honest – it doesn’t matter

The most revealing and frustrating part of working on and thinking about my own portfolio is that, when I’m thinking clearly, very little needs to be done. The current problems have nothing to do with design or technology — really, the gaping issues are 1) meaningful copy, 2) showing my best and newest work, 3) listing the services I actually provide. These are simple changes that can be done without a full re-design.

Even with this more focused strategy though, an unfortunate point keeps coming up — it still just doesn’t matter. At this point, I’m nearly convinced that my portfolio is a very small part of how I sell my services and secure new work (even if it’s one of my only marketing tools) — it’s really all about traditional marketing — writing and promoting this blog, making friends in the business, doing great work and getting referrals, handing out business cards at events, networking, blah, blah, etc.

Time spent writing, speaking, and being active about my company and firm is far more valuable than falling into the stereotype of the self-obsessed, “continual portfolio re-designer.” In the end, all the designing, thinking, and stress wasn’t due to just the lack of a great process — it just wasn’t really necessary at all.