Make your portfolio the way you want.

A humble request to designers to ignore most (but not all) of the “portfolio advice” out there.

A few weeks ago, my portfolio had completed two full years without having been updated. Like most designers, it received a full tune-up when I was looking to impress recruiters for a full-time job. But once I got the job, the site had fulfilled its purpose; and it has just sat there since, unmentioned and unappreciated.

In those two years, I have learnt and designed so much, that my old portfolio no longer reflects my current skillset and design standards. (Designers can relate to hating their work from two years ago.)

So after weeks of intense file-digging and re-exporting, I managed to set up a brand new website, with completely new case studies and projects. And when the reviews rolled in, I always found bits of advice wrapped within the praise.

“You needn’t have mentioned that”.

“This isn’t telling me much about you”.

“The images are far too big”.

And the one I keep hearing in design over and over again -
“there’s too much whitespace”.

There are several reasons why you should take this kind of feedback with a grain of salt.

Your portfolio needs to cater to your tastes. Only.

Amongst all the feedback I received, one stood out in particular. My current boss took one look at my website and blurted out within three seconds — “Nice. It’s very you.”

As it should be. It’s my personal portfolio; if it mirrors someone else’s aesthetic and nature, it has failed me. I love websites that are basically white, really spaced out, and pair full-bleed images with small, crisp text blocks that barely fill the remaining whitespace. To have a portfolio not exactly like that is a gross disservice to my own design sensibilities.

But step outside, and your design preference is always combating endless critique. A few of my personal favourites are things like “clients/recruiters won’t/don’t understand this type of design”, “it’s not modern”, and “it looks nice, but it isn’t solving any purpose.”

Sorry guys, but aesthetic is art — it’s not supposed to solve any purpose. Your portfolio is one place where you get full, end-to-end control over the design, without having any competing stakeholders and interests. Make sure it is original, attractive, and has all the flair you want in it. Do not design your portfolio to keep it familiar and banal; instead, design to evoke precisely the opposite reaction.

(That does not mean making your website unintuitive in any way; it just means using whatever aesthetic makes sense to you without bothering to explain or rationalise its use.)

Design to impress the one, not the many.

Browsing through Medium means frequently landing on articles like this, usually written by top recruiters and design QA specialists, that advise other designers on how to make their portfolio stand out.

Well, I don’t have a lot of years under my belt in either hiring designers or working as one, but I can safely tell you one thing; most of the things these people tell you they’re “looking for in a design portfolio” is basically bullshit.

No recruiter or client has ever opened someone’s portfolio holding a checklist of things they’re looking for. They don’t care if you mentioned (or didn’t mention) your design process, talked about the “broader landscape of the environment in which you designed”, highlighted the “impact your design has had on the actual product/business”, or if the projects are too few/many or too short/long.

They open any portfolio with two simple words in mind — impress me.

Content is king; they’ll get impressed with whatever they want to get impressed with, and you have little or no control over that. Some recruiters dig detailed explanations of processes, iterations, and decisions in case study formats; others might just want the actual design to take the spotlight, their minds blown with all the vibrancy and colour you’re throwing at them.

You can’t create one portfolio that will impress people on both sides of the spectrum. It’s not particularly hard to find two articles (both written from the POV of industry leaders in design recruitment) that offer polar opposite opinions on what should be in a designer’s portfolio. Ex. this article, which says design process in case studies are “paramount”, and this one, which wants you to get it over with in one sentence because “all designers do it”.

So instead, design a portfolio that will impress you. That is the best way to ensure your portfolio will impress people who are as like-minded as you are. Aren’t they the ones you want to work with anyway?

Tell the story as is. It’s okay if there are holes.

No one is looking through each case study you mention, noting down if you didn’t put wireframes in one or skimped on mobile-responsiveness in another. Recruiters and clients will barely spend 20 seconds on your portfolio if they hate it, and up to maybe 200 seconds if they really like it — but that’s about it.

In those seconds, you do not want to show them things that you aren’t proud of. You may have made terrible personas in one of your projects; in another, one of your screens has glaring consistency mistakes that you know any half-assed designer will spot. But again; no one is sitting with a checklist, demanding to see each and every deliverable you created. Skip all the crap work you’ve made that you don’t want to show.

One of my favourite projects was rebooted from the ground-up after six months of work; what ultimately went out after that was (in my opinion) a much more inferior product. But when the project went in my portfolio, I mentioned none of this; I featured only the six months of gorgeous work I created because that is the work I actually want to show.

In another project, I created just one branding document, but over 100 screens for a web dashboard. In the portfolio though, the branding document gets shown twice (in two bits), whereas the entire dashboard is over with by showing just one screen. Why? Because it made more sense to upsell the branding document in the case study’s larger narrative.

The truth is, none of your case studies will be perfect, because none of your projects were. They all involved compromise. Most of them would’ve skipped some steps in the design process. A lot of the wonderful design elements and principles you might’ve thought of then ended up buried and hidden in a stack of conventional designs that the client needed. And unless you’re very fortunate, at least some of your work hasn’t ever seen the light of day.

But who cares? Why showcase the bits you know are flawed just to complete the picture? Why clarify design decisions you didn’t take and don’t agree with? Why tell people that the designs you put so much sweat and swear into never made it to production because someone pulled the plug a few days before release? None of these things undermine your primary strengths as a designer or problem-solver, and none of them need to go into a place where the goal is to showcase your best work, complete or otherwise.

Ergo: if you’re holding out on showcasing some stunning work purely because you didn’t get the fair chance to complete it, don’t. If need be, say that you didn’t do a few things then that you now know you should’ve, or that you didn’t get time to complete the design the way you wanted to. But honestly, I don’t think any of that is necessary.

Before we leave though…

I’m hoping that by the time you’ve reached here, you feel a bit more confident about showcasing your work, and showcasing it in a manner and style you’re comfortable with. But there are still a few ground rules, almost agreed upon by everybody, that you should not ignore when making a portfolio;

Provide Closure. You can skip mentioning any and all bits in the projects you deem unnecessary, but ensure that the case study’s broader goal remains unaffected by these eliminations. Eg. if your case study is about branding, it’s okay to leave out a badly designed deliverable (whether a mug or a website), but not okay to skip on the basic brand elements like the logo, colours, philosophy, and the guide.

If necessary, restructure your case study so that it only needs the bits that you know are worth featuring; eg. in one of my projects, I actually designed both a mobile app and a web dashboard, but the web app was essentially incomplete (and not very pretty), so I skipped featuring it altogether. That hurt, but it’s better to score 50 out of 50 rather than 70 out of 100.

Do not rush through any case study. Maybe one of the main reasons some people suggest fewer and more detailed case studies is to ensure that none of your case studies are unimpressive. Put in as many projects as you want; but make each one of them spectacular, because you have no control over which case study is eventually opened by people. Why would you half-ass your portfolio anyway?

Never lie about the scale, or role. Recruiters are very likely to stumble across portfolios from people you’ve worked with (or are working with currently); it has happened to me more than once. So if they catch you claiming you designed something when it was actually designed by someone else, your reputation is already fucked before you’ve said a word. Always clear up the number of people involved in the design, and how much of the project work you’re showcasing was actually you (ideally, all of it).

Don’t be boring. Good design advice in general; but your portfolio should highlight what is unique about you and the work you’ve done. Don’t waste time by mentioning the bog-standard bits of design that basically everyone knows about (“I designed a common header that was used across the entire website”, yeah no shit) and don’t even bother telling people the timelines of the project (because honestly, it’s a rabbit hole; half your case study is then eaten up with dates and durations that no one actually cares about.)

Fill up your portfolio with all the stuff you did that other people didn’t think about; with whatever is unique to the project; with all the unique problems, and your solutions to them; and with whatever is memorable. Tell a story. Highlight your highs, bypass the boring, and string together a story with everything that you’re putting in. If your portfolio just says “I’m a designer”, you’re not a designer.