Portfolio tip: Look real by faking it

What’s an easy way to improve your design portfolio?

Make your work look real.

Did you design a killer poster? Show it hanging on wall or on a billboard. If it’s a magazine, take a picture of someone reading it. A web page? Put it in a browser and show it on a monitor. In other words, don’t just show the design work, give it a context.

In many cases, you won’t be able to physically place it in a real-world setting. For example, most of us can’t afford to rent a billboard to post design work just to take a picture of it. Thanks to the miracle of Photoshop and digital cameras, you can easily fake your way to looking real.

Just go outside, take a picture of the real billboard, and use Photoshop to composite your design work with the picture you took. Designers call this staging.

If you’re lazy and have some extra cash, check out LiveSurface, a library of high-resolution Photoshop templates for staging design work in seconds. It includes images for common objects such as books, CDs, boxes, and shopping bags. The library also has well-photographed outdoor shots of bus shelters, billboards, taxis, and storefronts.

All templates come pre-masked, with shadow and highlight layers, ready for you to place your design work.

Each template also impressively uses Photoshop’s vanishing point feature to automagically transform and adjust your flat design to the right perspective of the photograph. Check out the video demo.

Here’s an image of the vanishing point grid:

Now, that’s a time saver.