Designers, are you applying, but not getting bites? Do this.

I stopped mentoring in an official capacity, but designers do still reach out and it’s hard for me to say no — while I’ve talked about portfolio suggestions to increase your chances of getting hired before, I’ve got a renewed desire to clarify this all in one place. If you’re applying to places as a designer but not getting responses, consider this list of things that could be amiss in your work.

Please note that this is a guide for designers that want to work at tech companies (e.g., Instagram, Apple, Clubhouse, Uber, Airbnb, Figma, Linear, etc.) — if you want to work at other companies (e.g., Cisco, Workday, Amazon, U-Haul, Target, Fidelity, Walmart, Bank of America, CVS, Adobe, Autodesk, LinkedIn), this list will still work, but being too good at craft might hurt your chances with these companies.

Suggestion #1: push your visuals

Tech companies care a lot about the craft and quality of the software they put out, and the quality of their software and their brand is reflected in their stock price. A drop in quality will reflect in market closings — even for private and small companies like Linear and Figma, a big part of their appeal is their regard for quality — a value shared both by employees, and their discerning customers. They hire people who will be likely to share this value, and steward their established baseline for quality, and they sell to people who care about this.

I put this at the top of the list because, when a recruiter/CEO/designer/design manager pulls your portfolio up and they see a lack of craft, they’re closing the tab immediately. As mentioned, they need people who have a regard for quality, and it’s not optional. If your portfolio site looks bad, the probability that your work looks better is vanishingly low.

Companies that are willing to negotiate on this are not likely to be your target employer (e.g., tech companies — especially on smaller teams, where every hire absolutely matters). Technical skills are very hard to teach, take a very long time to build, and are strongly tied to your personal drive. For some practical examples of what quality you should not be aiming for, consider these corporate websites:

PWC and Intralinks. See also: CVS, Cisco, Workday, Amazon, etc. This is the level of quality I regularly see in mentoring. This isn’t going to work.

Here are some random examples of what your north star should be:

This is what you should be shooting for. LTR: jeongsteph.design, kwokyinmak.com, yamilah.com. Notice that these all have traits like: unconventional layouts, color, type choices, interaction models, and so on.

If you find it difficult to produce this quality of visual work, you need to put your graphic designer hat on. Here’s how:

How to improve your visuals

Product designers at tech companies generally have to have strong visuals, and the visual, at its most pure, is the domain of the graphic designer. Dipping your toes into their line of work is, therefore, the fastest way to get good at this. Interface work is intended to be simple and with minimal effects, so practicing product visuals over and over again will net you fewer gains over time. Push yourself the hardest to make the fastest gains.

Check out these posters and reproduce them perfectly every day. Over time, work your own takes into these. Visual design is a technical skill and, as you can imagine, technical skills take time — there’s no way around having to do these reps every day. With enough time, you’ll develop a taste for excellence, and you’ll start becoming more and more independent.

Left and right.

Suggestion #2: push on your concepts

When you finally get your visuals in order, you’ll need to have interesting ideas to use your dazzling technical skills on. Starting from the most important consideration, though: in your portfolio, you don’t need to show everything you’ve ever worked on.

What not to include

Here are some things you shouldn’t include in your portfolio:

• Bootcamp prompts. Your bootcamp/university may have given you prompts for your portfolio, like: “Design a food delivery app for a bakery.” “Design a delivery tracking app for a sushi restaurant.” “Design a flower catalogue app for a florist.” “Design an order tracking app for a trendy florist.” “Design a menu and payment app for a beachside snack shop.” These are completely unrealistic ideas that no consumer would ever want — they will bore your panelists, so they should not be in your portfolio.
• Wesbite design. Your bootcamp/university may have encouraged you to work with a local business (coffeeshop, etc.) to make a website for them. You’re looking to work at tech companies as a product designer, not a website/graphic designer, so any website work should not be in your portfolio.
• App redesigns. Your bootcamp/university may have encouraged you to redesign an app. These apps have dozens — and sometimes hundreds — of designers, dozens of strongly opinionated leaders, and a CEO that’s highly invested, etc. The probability that you can redesign Instagram better than Instagram is low. You’re probably not as visually skilled, can’t create a great justification for why the app should be redesigned, etc. And if you do have a great idea that would justify IG being redesigned, why not just purify that idea into your own, new app concept and build it yourself? If your redesign looks worse, works worse, isn’t interesting, your panelists will know and this will count against you.
• Simple/generic flows. You may have done some work for a company on things like onboarding flows, or checkout flows, improvements to alerts and messaging, changes to settings in the app, etc. These are very simple flows and are not going to demonstrate your skill, so these should not be in your portfolio.

What to include

• Mobile app work. Since you want to work at a tech company, and most tech companies work on mobile apps (with some notable exceptions, e.g., Linear and Notion), you need to mainly show mobile work. (Remove any websites or simple web apps (e.g., e-commerce, settings, etc.).)
• Sensible, original, and interesting app/feature concepts. Original ideas that actually make sense, like: design a karaoke experience into Disney+, allowing parents to play and sing along with their kids. Design the ability to pair their phones with their smart TVs so they can use it as a mic and get a nice sing-along UI. When you have an interesting idea that actually makes sense, it’ll make conversation super easy and fun. People reviewing your portfolio will actually be authentically curious, your panelists will “get” it, and that makes talking about your work way easier. Better, yet, if the idea is actually interesting and different!
• Feature ideas, rather than app redesigns. As mentioned, I’d recommend building features you believe should exist into something that currently exists. This is usually a lot less difficult than making a whole new, novel app, and it’s what you’ll be doing in most of your career as a designer, anyway. E.g., that karaoke idea, a new feature built into D+, rather than a whole new, karaoke app. I’m sure those already exist, anyway. Create these concepts every day. See something you think would be fun/useful in Discord, Spotify, Medium, iOS, macOS, IG, Snap, etc.? Go and design it.
• Lots of iterations. Try lots of different executions on your ideas. It shouldn’t be that you make a few screens, and they should also be coherent, full flows that go from end to end. At the highest performing teams at IG and Apple, you’re going to be doing iterations until you’re blue in the face, so get the jump on that early!

You should be concepting frequently and often. Think of a cool idea? Jot it down and save it for later. Keep a running list of ideas that you think of every day, pick your best three, and then go and make them!

(There are times when a company might find itself falling out of PMF and needing to completely reinvent itself and its app; if you’re a very skilled designer, you might be hired to help concept new app directions by companies in these situations, or you might work on a studio team at a big company where this happens in some capacity. But these are atypical situations and probably not something you’ll be doing early in your career, in the first place.)

Suggestion #3: don’t stop at Figma

This is a major unlock, but is difficult. While it has the highest return, it also has the highest cost to invest in — which is why I put it at the bottom of the list: you need to be prototyping. Once you start building complicated enough software, you’re not going to be able to get by with just simple, clickable prototypes you can make in Figma (or whatever you might be using, e.g., Sketch, Axure, etc.).

For example: the following are two concepts that are exactly the same, except with two different interaction models — left: TikTok style swipe. Right: Tinder style swipe. This interaction model, alone, changes entirely how the view is structure and how it works. Difficult to explain this with just screens.

Or, how about TikTok style swipes in stories? How would that change fundamentally how the feature is used? This is difficult to distill in just screens, alone. Changing just this interaction model completely changes stories in key ways: this opens up things like double tap to like, a whole new world that brings consistency to the IG stories universe! And so much more.

I’ve talked about this at length in a previous article, but prototyping is an expectation at the highest performing teams in tech (e.g., IG, Apple, etc.). Very few designers in the world can prototype but, if you want to work on the best teams at IG, Apple, and etc., it’s not optional. If you want to get attention from the coolest teams out there, you’ll need to speak their language!

TLDR

If people aren’t hitting you back up, think of it like a sales funnel to hack: people are not converting into your pipeline, and they seem to be bouncing on the first step. People are bouncing at the first glance at your application. This strongly implies that this is due mainly to the quality of your work you show up with. Push the quality! And you can do it by:

• Improving your visuals
• Concepting better ideas
• Prototyping (bringing those ideas to life in a very clear and visual way)

If you have, at times, gotten to further down the funnel (i.e., portfolio review stage) and it’s fallen off, this also strongly implies a quality problem that would be resolved by doing the above — what you share with your panelists during your portfolio review should be: (1) a deck, not a website, (2) visually high quality, (3) full of great concepts, (4) have some prototypes that clearly explain what your ideas are. If you’re sharing a website during a portfolio review, that’s not good. The website is a brochure you use while applying, and the deck is what you use to fully explain yourself while in the interview loop.

I realize that what I’m suggesting here likely means that, if acted on, you’d be restarting your portfolio. This has been the case with every individual I’ve mentored, and that’s most certainly over eighty people — I’ve sincerely lost track. You’re not alone in needing to reassess and reposition your work, though.

I know it’s a lot of work, but it’s what I’ve always done for myself — the advice I give is the advice I take, and the advice I’d give my dearest loved one. A lot of programs, bootcamps, and universities don’t prepare students to actually compete hard on the market but, being totally real, this is what it’s going to take.