Portfolio Website Examples: 16 Real Sites and What They Get Right

Sixteen real portfolio websites, checked live today: designer duo Anton & Irene, developer Bruno Simon's drivable 3D world, photographers Chris Burkard and Peter McKinnon, and studios like Pentagram and Buck. Grouped by discipline — designers, developers, photographers, studios — so you can study what actually works for a site like yours.

The 16 at a Glance

Designers & Art Directors

These four lead with a point of view about design itself, not just a gallery of finished work.

1. Anton & Irene

Anton & Irene is a two-person design studio, and its site reads like a magazine feature rather than a portfolio: long, slow-scrolling case studies with plenty of space between sections. It runs on Nuxt, not a website builder, which is why every scroll transition feels custom-tuned rather than templated. Visit Anton & Irene.

2. Mike Kus

Mike Kus's own site is proof his pitch works: he's a Framer specialist, and his site itself runs on Framer, confirmed by its server response. The homepage covers four disciplines — web design, branding, illustration and photography — without feeling scattered, because every section keeps the same visual language. Visit Mike Kus.

3. Adham Dannaway

Adham Dannaway's headline states his positioning in one line: "Product designer & front end developer." That single sentence does the work most portfolios spread across a paragraph. The rest of the homepage backs it up with shipped product work rather than concept pieces. Visit Adham Dannaway.

4. Tobias Ahlin

Tobias Ahlin built two small, free tools — SpinKit, a set of loading animations, and Moving Letters, a text-effects library — and put them on his own homepage next to his project list. They work as proof of skill that a static case study can't match: anyone can open the tool and see the code run. Visit Tobias Ahlin.

Developers & Creative Coders

For these four, the portfolio itself is the demo — the code that runs the page is the work being sold.

5. Bruno Simon

Bruno Simon's portfolio is a drivable 3D car scene: you steer around a small island to find sections instead of scrolling past them. It's an extreme approach, but an honest one — his work is Three.js and WebGL, and a static page couldn't prove that the way a working 3D scene does. Visit Bruno Simon.

6. Cassie Evans

Cassie Evans is known for SVG and CSS animation, and her homepage is built as a single animated scene rather than a scrollable page of text. There's no case-study copy competing for attention — the animation is the entire pitch, hosted on Netlify rather than a page builder. Visit Cassie Evans.

7. Jhey Tompkins

Jhey Tompkins's site is built with Astro and leads with playful UI experiments — CSS and JavaScript tricks — instead of a conventional project list. For a design engineer, that's the right call: the experiments demonstrate the exact skill a hiring team wants to see. Visit Jhey Tompkins.

8. Brittany Chiang

Brittany Chiang's homepage reads close to a resume: a short headline about building accessible, pixel-perfect experiences for the web, an experience list and a project list, with almost no decoration. For a software engineer whose audience is other engineers and recruiters, that restraint reads as competence rather than a missed opportunity. Visit Brittany Chiang.

Photographers

Photography portfolios succeed or fail on one thing: how fast the work fills the screen. All four get out of the way of the images.

9. Chris Burkard

Chris Burkard's site runs on SmugMug's photography platform, which doubles as his print store — the surf, landscape and travel photography he shoots for outlets like Surfer Magazine is browsable and purchasable from the same pages. It's a useful model if licensing or print sales matter to your own site. Visit Chris Burkard.

10. Peter McKinnon

Peter McKinnon runs his site on Squarespace, and it reads less like a gallery and more like a personal brand hub: photography sits alongside his YouTube channel. For a photographer who has built an audience beyond stills, that's a more honest homepage than a gallery alone. Visit Peter McKinnon.

11. Joe McNally

Joe McNally's WordPress site leans on decades of assignment work across nearly 70 countries, by his own count, and frames the homepage around who he is — photographer, director, author — rather than a single image category. It's a model for a long career where the story matters as much as any one shot. Visit Joe McNally.

12. Paul Nicklen

Paul Nicklen's WordPress site puts conservation photography front and centre: wildlife and polar landscapes shot in service of a cause, not just as stock. That framing, photography plus purpose, is worth studying if your own work has a mission attached to it. Visit Paul Nicklen.

Studios & Agencies

Studio sites carry more weight than an individual's — they have to prove a team, not one person, and most do it with named clients and awards.

13. Buck

Buck is a global animation and design studio, and its homepage leads straight into a reel rather than a mission statement. Hosted on Vercel, the site keeps navigation minimal so the work, not the framing around it, is what a visitor scrolls through first. Visit Buck.

14. Instrument

Instrument states its category plainly, a technology-led brand, product and marketing agency, and puts a named award, Design Studio Agency of the Year 2026, on the homepage before any case study. For a studio, naming the win up front is more convincing than describing it later. Visit Instrument.

15. Pentagram

Pentagram calls itself the world's largest independent design consultancy and explains its structure on the homepage: partners, each running their own practice under one name. That's an unusual amount of organisational detail for a homepage, and it works because the structure is the differentiator. Visit Pentagram.

16. Active Theory

Active Theory is a studio built around WebGL and interactive experiences, and its own site matches: full-screen motion from the first load rather than a conventional scroll. It's the highest-risk approach on this list, since slow motion-heavy sites can cost you visitors who bounce before load, but it's an honest demo of what the studio sells. Visit Active Theory.

What the Best Portfolio Sites Have in Common

• Every one leads with a specific line about who it is and what it does, never a generic welcome message.
• Sites that sell on craft, design, photography, motion, let the work fill the first screen; sites that sell a skill in words, engineering, product thinking, lead with a sentence instead.
• None of them cram every project onto the homepage: a small, curated set, with more behind a "Work" or project-archive link.
• Studios name real clients and awards; individuals mostly don't, and it costs them nothing.
• Contact is never buried: an email, a form, or a clear way to get in touch sits on the homepage itself.

Build Your Own Portfolio, Without Starting From Nothing

Waida Studio's portfolio category has 13 templates built for exactly this: designers, developers and studios who want the structure these examples show, without building it from a blank canvas.

Obliq is free to remix on Framer, with Webflow, HTML, Next.js and Astro versions from $39, if you want a portfolio that leans closer to Mike Kus's clean, multi-discipline layout.

Check out Obliq template

NueStudio takes the studio-reel approach further, with a heavier case-study layout suited to design and creative agencies. It's $49 on Framer, HTML, Next.js and Astro, and $79 on Webflow.

Check out NueStudio template

For more options across both platforms, see Best Framer Portfolio Templates and Best Webflow Portfolio Templates.

The sites above range from a drivable 3D car to a plain, text-led resume, and all of them work because each one matches its owner's actual craft: photographers show images, engineers show code, studios show scale. If you'd rather start from a working layout than a blank Framer or Webflow canvas, Waida Studio's portfolio templates start free and run from $39 across every platform, with an unlimited-project commercial licence on every purchase. See pricing for the Pro and Ultra plans that add template credits on top.