Portfolio Advice

I’ve spent the first month of my post-bootcamp time chatting with designers, recruiters and design managers. In this process, I’ve talked to around 30 people in companies ranging from agencies to tech comanies and have gotten a lot of great advice on my portfolio and early design career.

It took a ton of time and effort, but the feedback has helped me build a pretty decent portfolio. In the spirit of sharing, here’s a summary of what people I talked to wanted to see when they looked at a portfolio. The points are generally targeted towards a product or UX design position.

Landing page

1. Are you visually competent?

Designer are visual creatures. Even if they keep insisting that they care above all about problem-solving abilities, everyone has an aesthetic bar you have to pass. How high that bar is depends on the kind of position and company.

Also, keep in mind that the first person to see your portfolio might often be a busy recruiter, who is often more influenceable by visuals.

2. Can you ship?

After you pass the visual screen, they want to see if you’ll be able to ship design. Most people I’ve seen want to see that you’ve done a variety of work, then they’ll click into the first case study to make sure that your cases are of quality.

Hardly anyone reads my other case studies. Put your best case first. The rest are mostly skimmed to make sure that you’re prolific.

3. How do I contact you?

Make your email easy to find, but please don’t force people to use a mailto:your@email.com link. Many people don’t have it configured to go to their preferred client and it can be annoying to switch back.

Also, don’t use a contact form unless you are looking for freelance gigs. Forms don’t allow any sort of formatting, do not autosave and are generally associated with business inquiries.

Case studies

1. Are you visually competent?

Again? Yes, again. For three reasons:

1. You want to immediately draw the viewer in with the caliber of your final output. Once they are visually hooked, you can take the time to reel them through your essay. This is true even for UX portfolios, which too often neglect the visuals.
2. Good case studies tend to be pretty dense. Try to display your content so that it can be easily and accurately consumed. This is when you break out the typography, sub-headings, pull quotes, drop caps, lists, side notes — anything to break up the monotony of paragraphs.

3. Bonus points if your images are responsive. If you’re meeting designers for coffee chats, I guarantee that they will check out your work on their phone before the meeting. Make sure that your images are still legible on phone-screens.

2. What is your design process like?

I’ve seen 3 ways of structuring this:

1. Screencap galore: If you have really good visuals, use those to tell the story, just like a comic book. Make sure to include some concept drafts and in-progress shots. This approach banks on the quality of your viz to get an interview, where you will talk through your detailed process.
2. Chronological: Easy to follow and easy to write, but pretty boring unless you are a good writer. If you do this, make sure to edit your story to make it as concentrated as possible.
3. Problem → Solution → Process: This is my personal favourite. Instead of giving an overview of your experience, you use your portfolio to give a brief taste for the challenges you’ve encountered and your thinking around them. Just enough to make them curious, but not enough to bore them.

Your online portfolio is just a hook that gets you an interview where you’ll have the chance to deploy an extensive walkthrough of your work.

About you:

1. What kind of work do you want to do?

Initially, I didn’t express this at all because I thought that as a new designer, I wouldn’t get to choose the kind of work I’d do. Then, I got asked this exact question on three separate occasions and felt a little silly.

Turns out, the design job market is open enough that you do get some choice. And even if you don’t, stating your objectives shows that you’ve thought about your craft and your career. It also makes it easier for someone trying to help you to make the right introductions. So think about:

1. The type of company you want to work at.
2. The market/problem/product you want to be tackling.
3. The role and design subfields you want to get involved in.

Ideally, your body of work also shows examples of the above.

2. How do I relate to you?

This last one is tricky. As much as your portfolio is about showing people how and what you design, people want to know the kind of person you are.

How do you think? What drives you? What’s your personality? Are you gonna fit with the gang? They want to be able to relate to you on a personal level.

There are many ways to create that connection. You can demonstrate your hobbies or side-projects, talk about how and why you came into design, talk about your passion for the field — whatever you think is both honest and will resonate with the average reader.

TL;DR

1. Polish up your visuals, even if you’re not a visual designer.
2. Treat your portfolio as an asset to get you an interview, not an comprehensive log of your experience.
3. Showcase your individuality, but not at the expense of your work.

PS. I’ve linked to my own portfolio a lot because that’s what I got feedback on, but I strongly encourage you to look at a variety of them.