Are you an aspiring artist or game designer looking to curate a standout portfolio that captures attention and showcases your expertise? The art of presenting your work isn’t just about displaying images, it’s about narrating your creative journey, demonstrating your skills, and resonating with your desired audience.

In this Tactile Tips Series, we delve into the key elements that elevate your portfolio, whether you’re an experienced professional or just getting started. From refining your art portfolio to unveiling the complexities of game design presentations, we’ve gathered insights and tips from our industry experts to help you craft a portfolio that helps you land the job you want.

Art Portfolio Tips

Quality over Quantity
Instead of flooding your portfolio with a lot of pieces that don’t really show your current skill level, focus on centering only the works that exemplify your expertise. While it can be useful to see your progression over time, some of your assets might no longer represent your current level. And as much as the person reviewing the portfolio should look past that, it could show some past weaknesses that you don’t have anymore, but once you see it you can’t unsee it.

Organize & Navigate
Consider categorizing your work based on styles, themes, or mediums. Use clear titles and sections for easy browsing. An example could be dividing your portfolio into sections like “Character Animation,” “Environment Art,” and “Storyboarding” to assist viewers in finding what interests them quickly.

Context Matters
When presenting a project, explain not only what it is but also your specific contributions. For instance, if you worked on a scene consisting of environmental and character art and animation, make sure to name your and each team member’s individual contributions.

Regular Updates
Treat your portfolio as a living document. Add new projects and skills as you develop them. If you recently mastered a new technique or software, integrate it into your portfolio to reflect your current abilities.

Storytelling
It’s all about storytelling and composing a coherent scene. If applicable, place your character in a scene that makes sense dramaturgically. For instance, when you illustrate a messy, chaotic character, their representation should be coherent with their surroundings. If they drive a car, the car should look dirty and messy too, or if they’re chilling in their home, it shouldn’t look too clean and tidy.

Personal Touch
Consider adding a personal statement or a brief narrative explaining your artistic journey. For example, describe how your love for mythology influences your character designs or how traveling inspires your environmental art.

Game Design Tips

Prioritize Released Games (if you can)
Feature your top 3-5 fully released titles prominently. For example, if you’ve worked on mobile games, highlight the ones that garnered significant downloads or received positive reviews. It also can’t hurt to add some information on the games’ tech stack and your individual contributions.

Context, Context, Context
Demonstrate your understanding of game design history and trends. For instance, you implemented a unique mechanic inspired by classic games but reimagined it in a modern context. Make sure to explain how you merged nostalgia with innovation to create a fresh gaming experience. And don’t forget to add information such as feature goals, challenges, mechanics, test iterations, feedback, results and your lessons learned.

Process Insights
Offer in-depth insights into your game design process. If you created a game mechanic that significantly impacted player engagement, walk through its evolution—from initial concept to playtesting iterations. Highlight how player feedback influenced your design decisions.

Metrics and Analytics
Share specific metrics to validate your contributions. If your game experienced a high retention rate or received industry recognition, quantify and detail these achievements. For instance, provide retention percentages or awards received for game design excellence.

Play Links
Make it easy for viewers to access and play your showcased games. Include direct links to playable demos, app store pages, or web versions. Ensure these links are easy to find on your portfolio.

Tips for Juniors

Pet Projects
Don’t hold back on exhibiting your personal projects to show your diverse interests and ambition to create. For instance, if you’re exploring various animation styles, feature short animation clips demonstrating your experimentation with different techniques. For seasoned professionals, it’s interesting to see juniors dabbing in different areas/types of animation because it gives an insight to their curiosity and eagerness to learn.

Sketches
Don’t hesitate to show sketches in your portfolio. They offer a glimpse into your creative process and can often communicate your unique and exciting ideas. For example, we once spoke to an artist who showed a lot of polished, final assets but we were lacking an illustration of their creativity, so we asked them to show some sketches that were exciting and fun to look at because they showed raw creativity and playfulness.

Versatility
Display your versatility by experimenting with various types of animation or design. If you’re a junior game designer, showcase projects where you explore different genres or gameplay mechanics.

Time for Talent with Martina Welander

Meet Martina Welander aka Documentina 👋 Our super talented Technical Writer, who goes beyond words to come up with creative ways to document our tools and processes. But we’ll let her do the talking – read her full story below (it’s a good one!).

Tactile: Hi Martina, could you tell us a bit more about what you do at Tactile?

Martina: I write ✨ technical documentation ✨ on a fabulous team of one. I write everything from system architecture overviews to user tutorials to API documentation. My days are spent ferreting around in codebases, hunting down precious morsels of context in the dustiest corners of Slack, and thinking up ways to make stuff like security protocols fun to read about. And pestering my fellow Core Teamsters for information, of course.

Tactile: What was your journey to becoming a Tech Writer?

Martina: It just happened – I did a history degree and never really had a plan. I wrote my first line of CSS on neopets.com in 2000 (Neopians unite) and accidentally became a backend developer because I needed to create a database for all my RPG characters. This eventually led to several Serious Jobs as a developer and technical consultant, which turned into blogging a lot about the stuff I figured out, and now I write for a living. There were probably more steps but it felt very ‘whoopsie poopsie guess I’m a writer now’.

Tactile: What do you like the most about the team you’re working with?

Martina: They are good eggs. Patient, kind, smart, a lil’ bit weird, a lil’ bit sassy.

Tactile: What is the most rewarding part of your job?

Martina: Variety. Sometimes I write songs about A/B tests, sometimes I draw cartoons about API keys, sometimes I code, 🎵 SOMETIMES I RUN, SOMETIMES I HIDE 🎵, and sometimes I actually write things down (that’s the hardest part about being a writer). It makes my day when I hear that my work helped someone or saved them time, particularly new starters.

Tactile: For people who would like to start their career, what do you think are the most important qualities that every (tech) writer should have?

Martina: Curiosity. If Tactile decided to pivot into making croissants I would go all in on explaining the chemistry of butter through the medium of dance; learning is fun, kids! If you want to write for developers, I think it really helps to have at least some experience with programming – either as a hobby, or by working as a developer or in QA. If you are starting from scratch and want to be seen, try to figure out how to do something that interests you (a recipe app, a to-do app) and blog about the challenges you encounter.

Time for talent with Ivan Aguilar

Today we’re inviting into the spotlight Ivan Aguilar – a key part of our Data Science & Analytics Team! Read more about his story below & don’t miss out on his advice for those aspiring to work in data science or analytics 🙌

Tactile: Hi Ivan, could you tell us a bit about what you do at Tactile?

Ivan: I work as a Data Scientist for the games team. My job mainly consists of supporting Product Managers and Level Designers with data insights, helping them to create and monitor experiments, interpret results, find signals to support/reject player behaviour hypothesis, and a bit of everything data related.

Tactile: What was your journey to becoming a Data Scientist?

Ivan: I studied computer science and had the luck of immediately getting involved with data analysis jobs early on in my career. Afterwards, I did a lot of data analytics consulting, which allowed me to try a lot of different industries and work cultures. More recently, I completed a master’s degree in data science which complemented well my previous experiences.

Tactile: What do you like the most about the team you’re working with?

Ivan: They are all very friendly and cooperative, but also open and honest when there are differing opinions. The team is diverse which makes it possible to have a well rounded view on any topic we work with.

Tactile: What is the most motivating part of your job?

Ivan: The most motivating for me is learning the logic behind things and then understanding how data can help you modify, predict or explain those things. It is like constantly solving puzzles. Having those “aha” moments when solving the data puzzle is very enjoyable. At times, even if you don’t get to a definitive solution or answer, the journey is an enriching experience.

Tactile: For people who would like to start their career, what do you think are the most important qualities that every data person should have?

Ivan: There are some basic things that are quite useful, such as a background that can provide exposure to programming and math concepts. On the more subjective side, I think is good to have a certain degree of discipline when approaching problem-solving, a constant self-assessment of your work to keep facts checked and an open mind to learn new things.

Tactile: When you’re not at work, you are …

Ivan: Taking photographs with my analog cameras, playing some version of Zelda and listening to music obsessively.