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Portfolio website tips for biomedical visualization students
Making a portfolio website for the first time can be daunting, I get it. These are the portfolio practices I’d hand to any biomedical visualization grad preparing for the job hunt.
In my years mentoring and teaching students in the biomedical visualization field, I have reviewed a lot of portfolio websites.
What I have noticed, year after year, across different schools, is that a common pattern emerges in portfolio websites that look strong, as well as those that miss the mark. Many of these decisions also have nothing to do with the quality of the work itself. They have to do with how the work is presented, and to whom.
Today I want to walk through the patterns that come up most often, and the things I’d tell any student getting their site ready for the post-graduation job hunt.
You’re designing for someone like you
There are two common kinds of portfolio websites a biomedical visualization student might build. One is aimed at potential clients, such as pharmaceutical clients, researchers, surgeons, people who would hire you as a freelancer directly. The other is aimed at potential employers, like studio owners, art directors inside medical communication teams. The two are not talking to the same audience, which is why the sites should not be built the same way.
Your audience is not a surgeon or a researcher who may not know why a 3D animation is complex to produce. Your audience is an informed industry professional, most likely someone with a creative background who knows exactly what they are looking at.
This audience reads your work differently. A potential client outside of our industry usually needs more guidance on understanding our collaboration process, services offered, and what value we can add to their end goal. Someone like an art director is starting at the next level: the rendering technique, the colour palette, the software you use. They are also disproportionately interested in your process. By keeping your target audience in mind, the website structure will become easier to design.
The website does not need to be unique, because your work is
I use this analogy a lot: treat your portfolio like an art gallery.
The gallery is not the point. The gallery is the room your work lives in. A beautifully designed empty room is still empty. A simple, well-organized, well-lit room full of strong work is what gets the attention from your visitors.
I see a lot of students spend three or four months perfecting the site design, redoing past projects to get the “perfect” hero image, adding custom code so that the site has a cool entrance animation or interactive widgets. Meanwhile, the live site is delayed, no employer can see the work, and hiring rounds quietly pass them by.
Unless web design is one of your top stated skills, this delay is almost never worth it.
Job openings get posted throughout the year for many reasons. A studio might get a heavy workload suddenly, or someone from their team leaves. The earlier your work is visible, the more revisits your site will get. And just like any creative work, if you are not satisfied with the first version, you can always update it later.
Show diverse work to signal adaptability
New grads are not expected to specialize. Most studios will look at your portfolio and try to figure out where you might fit in their team. The more clearly your work signals “I have the potential to do several of these well,” the easier it is for them to imagine placing you.
If you already have a specialization, such as a strong interest and skillset in interactive design, that is also a strength. Lean into it. But no matter how much work you have produced, try to display your strongest work only, a good range is 8-12 pieces.
Show the process for at least two projects
This is the section the best student portfolios get right and the average ones skip.
Final images tell the reviewer what you can produce. Process work tells them how you think.
Pick two projects and expand them. Show the early reference gathering. Show the brainstorm thumbnails. Show the ten directions you considered before narrowing to the two that made the cut (even better if you can explain why). Show the colour exploration, the rendering tests, the revisions, the final…
My former boss once told me he hired me specifically because of how I had presented the process work on my site. It signalled to him that I would be suitable for a role involving art direction.
I will dig into the specifics of what “design decision-making” is all about in a future post.
“Final images tell the reviewer what you can produce. Process work tells them how you think.”
Make your contact information impossible to miss
A clear contact button in the main navigation. Your email visible in the footer on every page. A link that goes to an up-to-date LinkedIn profile. A downloadable CV that allows visitors to skip the extra step to log into LinkedIn. The easier it is to reach you, the more you will be reached.
Free portfolio reviews
Because this is graduation season, we’re offering something different this year.
Each month, our team will review up to 5 medical visualization student portfolios and send back 5 specific, actionable improvements you can make. We know it can be tough in the job market out there, but we want to help as many students as possible. Submit your portfolio here:
To everyone graduating this year: congratulations! The work you have done, whether it’s studying for anatomy exams till 2am, or booting up multiple computers to render your animations, all that work matters, and it is the foundation of the career you are about to start.
About the author
Nancy Chu Ji is Co-founder and Director of BioHues Digital. With 8 years of experience in biomedical communications, she combines scientific expertise with visual storytelling to create engaging educational and marketing content for the health sector. Nancy has partnered with leading organizations including Tencent, ByteDance, Edwards Lifesciences, and Emory Healthcare, helping them drive impact through the effective use of medical visualization. Nancy is also Treasurer of the Association of Medical Illustrators and a sessional lecturer at the University of Toronto.
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