Choosing Logos For A Portfolio
How Many Logos should a Logo Designer put in their Portfolio?
After being a Logo Designer for a number of years now I have quite a lot of logos that I have created for various clients that could be featured in both my online and paper based portfolio. It is tempting to put them all in and many logo designers choose to feature all their logos within their portfolio which makes sense to show potential clients that you have the experience but is it possible to over do it?
I myself am a big believer that “Less is More”, but having said that it is quite impressive to see lots of work in a designers portfolio if the work is of a high standard. So when is enough logos enough within a portfolio?
My approach to this is to select the best designs I believe I have as well as to get feedback from others about which of the Logos I have designed they feel are in their opinion the best. An excellent way of getting feedback is to post your logos on a blog and ask for feedback on the designs. You can do this on your own blog if you have a good number of daily visits or you can ask to post your logos on a logo design based blog that features designers work. You should be prepared for some negative feedback as well though as not everybody likes the same things and some people just like to be negative 
Another point to make here is to not only get feedback from other designers as designers appreciate logos on a more complex level and your potential clients will not usually be other designers. Having said that it is still a very good idea to get some opinions from experienced designers that have been working in the industry for a while.
Once you have received some feedback for your logos you should be quite well equipped to begin putting a list together of your logos that you and others believe to be the best of your work. You should put the strongest logos at the start of the portfolio as you need to impressive from the very first example to keep people interested enough to move on to the next example. If you keep adding the logos in this way until you come to the logos that you feel unsure about.
If you feel positive about adding the logos at the start of your portfolio and not so comfortable with the later ones this probably means you are now adding work that is not showing the best of your ability. I believe that it would be better to add only 8 logos that you felt confident with than to add 16 that you felt unsure about half of.
For Logo Designers just starting out picking and choosing logos is not an option as you will probably have to feature pretty much everything you have just to have 8 logos but if you stick to around this number and replace the weaker ones over time with some stronger examples this will help to build a strong portfolio and when you have lots of logos that you feel confident about you can extend your portfolio until your heart is content.
This is only my opinion and approach to selecting the best logos for a portfolio so I would be interested to hear from any other designers about their approach to this.
I hope this is of some use to somebody and thanks very much for visiting and reading.
