Graphics

Refine Your Design: Tips for Doing More For Your Items, With Less.

Some authors may think that more items in their Elements portfolio translates to more downloads. This is not necessarily the case, especially when the portfolio contains multiple variations on the same item. On Elements, we are focused on quality, not quantity, and having many variations of the same few items in your portfolio can impact its performance.

Bombarding subscribers with hundreds of similar files can overwhelm them and make it difficult to find what they’re actually looking for.

Robot painter decorator by Besjunior.

With Elements, we want subscribers to have a virtual candy store of high-quality items they can use in their own projects. We think of Elements as a designer’s toolkit, where a large portion of subscribers are themselves working artists, who are looking for high-quality assets to augment and accelerate their own work.

Over-saturating and crowding the library makes it harder and more time consuming for subscribers to find the items they need.

For example, rather than uploading five separate items made up of the same icon set in different colorways, you can include all five color sets in a single item. The color variations are a great way to show how versatile your icons are, but a good designer will only download one item, then will likely modify the icons using the color scheme for their particular project.

Remember that subscribers are designers capable of editing the files to fit their needs.

Similarly, do not create items made of the same elements simply rearranged. Object-oriented vector files and infographics, for example, can be edited by the subscriber to suit themselves.

Presenting different compositions using the same objects is unnecessary.

Have a look at your current portfolio and see what needs refining. For your next submission, make sure to check how your items are made up and presented to customers – look for quality, relevancy and attractiveness. You can check out more tips on creating a successful portfolio in this article here!

For more information, please see our guidelines on bundling and splitting items and our general quality expectations.

What do you think are the characteristics a successful portfolio? Share your tips, thoughts and insights on refining design with your fellow community on the Envato Forums now.

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