About Folios
Folios is a directory of portfolio sites by digital designers in Canada. Each listing is a designer's own website, reviewed by a person before it goes up.
Designers and builders
By builders we mean designers who build. They prototype in code, make their own sites and tools, and ship what they design. Folios is a directory of designers first. Engineers who also design are welcome to admire the work, but their portfolios belong somewhere else.
Why a directory like this
Most places to find designers ask something of them first. Some sit behind a paywall. Others need an account, a profile, and a fresh upload of work that already lives on the designer's own site. Designers end up maintaining the same case studies in four places, and the version people find is rarely the one they care about most.
Folios takes the opposite approach. If you have a portfolio on your own domain, that's the listing. Nothing to upload, no account, no fee. Visitors land on your site, as you built it, not on a copy of it.
Why there are no specialization tags
Most designers wear more than one hat. A product designer runs research, ships UI and maintains the design system. A brand designer builds the website too. Tags like "UX" or "UI" split people into boxes that don't match how they work, and the lines between those areas keep moving. So instead of sorting designers by label, Folios shows you their work and lets it speak. A screenshot of the site tells you more than a tag can.
You can browse by province or territory, sort by name, or see who is open to work.
Who gets listed
A portfolio is listed when it meets a few plain rules.
- It's on the designer's own domain. No platform subdomains or profile pages.
- It shows one person's digital design work, with real projects.
- The site says the designer is based in Canada.
- It's in English or French.
- The designer has a LinkedIn profile, so there's a way to confirm who they are and where they work.
- The designer isn't a student.
Every submission is checked by a person against these rules.
Claiming your listing
If your portfolio is listed, you can claim it by adding a DNS record or a meta tag to your site. Claimed listings get a verified badge, and you can
- set your availability,
- pick which page of your site we use for your screenshot,
- ask for a new screenshot when your site changes.
You don't need an account, and we never ask for your email.
Submit a portfolio
Know a designer whose work belongs here? Your own counts too. Submit it and we'll review it against the criteria.
Who runs it
Folios is built and maintained by Oz Gultekin, a product experience designer in Montreal.