Design Portfolio: PDF vs Web
As Designers, many of us at some point have contemplated this question : Shall I go for an Online Portfolio or create a PDF? Or sometimes… BOTH?
I’m going to talk about a few tips that can help you make that decision, ofcourse based on my personal experiences in the industry.
Before we get into details, I’d like to point out some common thoughts that influence such decisions. Apart from some good tips on this post, I’d like to add some more dimensions a designer must be able to think about before making this decision. Resonating on the fact that an online portfolio is most preferred, as it is very ‘Now’ as opposed to the ‘old’ heavy Pdf files that used to be circulated on emails. Sometimes you may feel a company asking for a PDF format of Portfolio is so dated and better to avoid, but there is about 10% chance a PDF format can be helpful(assuming very few of us work on serious proprietary software). Read on to know how..
Essentially every designer’s body of work falls under one of the two large umbrellas — Services or Product
Very rarely do you find yourself working in an ideal combination of both, for e.g. if you are at a FROG design or an IDEO kind of place (very rare profile in India)
Services Design
If you are part of a Services design set up, the design briefs you may be working on are often short-term or time-bound, sometimes too short to build full-fledged design solutions. Design solutions worked out in a matter of few-weeks are often just PoCs(Proof of Concept) and are compromised on user research and usability testing aspects. In such scenarios, the work you build up is more inclined to showcase your creativity and imagination, mostly backed with a lot of desk-based research. This type of work can easily be showcased online, since there isn’t much process to elaborate about. Basically you may have performed the design process, but discretely and mostly by making a lot of assumptions, with less real cross-checking with real users.
Product Design
If you are part of a Product Design setup, involvement with the product is much deeper in terms of technology and target users. Ofcourse there can be UX profiles where you are told the users are ‘overseas’ and you can work with only ‘secondary’ research (still prevalent in India) — I will discuss this a little later. Let’s first consider for now you are in an ideal Product design setup.
An ideal Product team gives you the opportunity to interact with the Engineering experts, Business stakeholders and potential Users. And if you are lucky to be part of such a setup, make most of it.
However, this will call for an in-depth knowledge about the Product(or Product platform), company infrastructure, engineering capabilities and such, which often is protected under NDAs and it becomes difficult for a designer to showcase their work in full glory. This is particularly true for Enterprise softwares. In this case too, an online portfolio can come in handy, as it can allow you to be discreet about the actual designs and focus on your key design process initiatives and findings from it. Also you need not get into details of the product, simply because 99% of the times an outsider will not understand the context of the product, and believe me they are not interested either.
Sometimes, there are companies who ask you to share the detailed work on a PDF, on a secure medium like email, so they can evaluate your work better. Be careful, they often try to say that since it is privately shared, you may not be in breach of your NDA with previous employer — I do not think it is completely true.
A PDF format however, will help you elaborate a large project in a product design scenario, with every detail of your design process and its findings. You can take the liberty to highlight and showcase the work, taking care you do not reveal any business specific or potential patent worthy features of the Product.
In case the design solution is in public domain, where all its features and interactions are public, those can always be showcased giving due credit to all stakeholders.
Services in disguise of Products
I’ve chosen this word cloud because it shows the reality so well. You will find terms like ‘User Experience’ ‘Experiment’ ‘Behavioural Science’ ‘Interventions’ in such small fonts. This is the reality of most Product teams across the world. The reason being most of them are basically an extension of pre-existing engineering teams or service management teams. Hence they happen to inherit a lot of baggage in terms of technology, customer relationships and contracts and a plethora of other constraints — making it quite difficult for a designer to push those boundaries. In such environments, you need to turn into a ‘Batman’ of sorts to build a rapport so you are allowed to do what you do best — improve User Experience. Anyway, that is another topic to discuss later…
On subject of Portfolio, you may want to choose an online format. Because frankly the reality of your design process here will be half-baked, most of times you may not even be allowed to change things a lot due to existing technical constraints. You can make most of it by experimenting and researching on a personal level, create case-studies, and showcase those as your own unique perspective about a product. Such companies, often accustomed to ‘Jurrasic’ methods, can sometimes be open to review your case-studies, in that case you can create a detail PDF, that they shall print and circulate for review among their dinosaurs :)
Want to learn more?
If you’d like to become an expert in UX Design, Design Thinking, UI Design, or another related design topic, then consider to take an online UX course from the Interaction Design Foundation. For example, Design Thinking, Become a UX Designer from Scratch, Conducting Usability Testing or User Research — Methods and Best Practices. Good luck on your learning journey!
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