Powering Up Your Design Portfolio: 5 Tips for Success

The most challenging part of starting a design career dominates most design advice inquiries: “How should I approach my portfolio?”

Cheryl Platz
Ideaplatz
Published in
11 min readSep 30, 2021

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In addition to traditional interviews, user experience designers have an extra hurdle to jump through when seeking a new role: the design portfolio. This all-important self-promotional tool plays two roles:

  • As a passive promotional tool, your design portfolio is what hiring managers use to determine whether they want to invite you to a phone screen. You won’t be considered for a design role without some form of prior work to review.
  • As a content source, your design portfolio powers your case study or portfolio presentation if you’re fortunate enough to get to final interview stages with a company.

Inevitably, when new designers come to veteran designers for advice, they aren’t coming to ask about our subject matter expertise — they’re asking for portfolio advice. I’ve always been surprised when folks come asking me for this advice, since I think mid-career folks who are closer to that early career stage are more qualified to answer this for newer designers. Still, I do get asked frequently as a veteran and hiring manager, and I’m a big believer in sharing my answers publicly rather than replying once or twice to folks who happen to know someone I know.

Honestly, it’s very difficult to give general portfolio advice outside of a paid career coaching conversation, as the advice probably needs to shift based on what material you have to offer. It does you no good if I tell you to emphasize content you don’t yet have; your storytelling challenge is then to make the most of what you DO have.

Regardless, those questions keep coming, so I’m going to share my top 5 pieces of general portfolio advice in this article with the caveats:

  • Your mileage will vary based on what projects you have to work with,
  • Random design strangers will generally not be able to give you personalized advice outside of paid coaching conversations, and
  • There are some good self-guided portfolio tools and tutorials out there if you’re really serious about putting in the work.

I refer a ton of folks to Sarah Doody’s UX Portfolio Formula and her online community — I believe you should be taking portfolio and early career advice from someone who’s specializing in early career needs, if that describes your current stage. (The course requires paid registration, but there is a free starter masterclass available.) I don’t get any referrals or anything for this recommendation; I just generally believe you’ll get better results from this approach than asking several veteran designers you’ve never met who don’t know your content for advice.

If you ask many strangers who don’t know you for advice about your portfolio, you’ll get a bunch of advice that doesn’t take into account the content you have available. Options like Sarah Doody’s UX Portfolio Formula let you take a more customizable, self-driven, and early-career focused approach to improvement.

At this particular point in my career, I’m late stage and my portfolio is largely complex case studies, and I’m most often interviewing senior+ talent. That will likely change in 6 months or so, but my advice should be taken with a grain of salt and compared with folks who specialize in working with early-career designers if that describes your current situation. That said, without further ado: here are my top general tips for UX portfolios.

1. Clearly position yourself in the context of the project.

Your hiring manager wants to know that you can work as part of a team, BUT they ALSO want to know what YOU SPECIFICALLY have done. It’s up to you to walk this line. Make sure each project includes:

  • A section calling out at least the titles or roles of key stakeholders and partners, and
  • A description of your design team and your respective roles and responsibilities ON THIS PROJECT.

It’s also important to use the terms “I” and “we” thoughtfully — I’ve seen hiring managers call out applicants who only use “we” and failed to specify their responsibilities for potentially taking credit for other people’s work. Where you had specific responsibility, use I. Where you collaborated with others, use “we” or “the team.”

Example from my Power Platform Admin Center case study where I’m describing the design team on the Settings project. Also visible is the beginning of the storytelling which covers assessing the existing problem.

2. Help me see HOW you solve problems, not just WHAT you produced.

Unless you’re interviewing as a deeply focused visual designer (and some folks are, but you know who you are), as a hiring manager I want to learn these things from your case study:

  • What problems you faced
  • What explorations you considered
  • How you made a decision
  • How you pivoted based on research or customer feedback
  • Any information about impact or outcome

This means you’re going to need to balance images with narrative, and you’re going to need to break up your narrative into logical sections that mirror your design process. Just as you want your UI to be easily scannable, you want your case study to be easily scannable too.

As for visuals, in-progress visuals are just as valuable, if not more so, as the finished project. Sketches and (intelligible, not generic) mind maps and brainstorms show me how you approach sensemaking. Wireframe explorations show me how you apply creativity to a known project space. Presentations, redlines with annotations, or selections from documentation might show me how you communicate with stakeholders and developers.

A bonus section, if you’re comfortable with it, can be a discussion of what you would have done differently. This shows growth and self-reflection, and is also a way to show how you’d pivot based on user feedback if you didn’t have a chance to do that in the scope of the project.

3. Consider the information architecture of your portfolio site.

75% of the portfolios I see are a simple list of projects, either by company name or a vague project name. Use your UX design skills to put yourself in the shoes of a hiring manager: did I come to your portfolio looking to verify you’ve worked for City Steelworks or Amazon? No. I came to evaluate whether your past experience aligns with our needs. Those needs usually come in the form of “has worked at enterprise scale” or “is familiar with the healthcare market.”

As you begin your job search and get a sense for the skills folks are looking for, you can organize your portfolio in terms of those skills instead of just a flat list of employers by chronology. This is, of course, easier if you use a content management system like WordPress that allows you to tag and build custom menus. Then, as a hiring manager, I can easily focus on the portfolio examples that are most likely to align to my needs.

Keep in mind — NO employer is going to look at ALL of your examples. At most, you’re going to be lucky if they look at 3 examples. So if you only have one or two examples that are relevant to THIS employer, are you making it as easy as possible for them to get to that content? Or are you playing career roulette and placing all of your bet on one hard-to-find entry in your portfolio?

For me, I’m late-career so I have a wide and growing number of projects to cover. I don’t personally subscribe to the “only show a few projects” theory (your mileage may vary) because with my varied experience different projects fill different niches. Instead, I have a robust information architecture that lets visitors browse by skill, industry, or technology focus, while the homepage highlights the 6 top projects, the 6 most recent additions, and my three most unique skillsets.

As a corollary of this advice, I would make decisions about your portfolio site’s technology and layout based on usability, not full flexibility on appearance. I promise you, you will be more harshly judged on a hard-to-navigate portfolio than you will by using a Wordpress template. Many designers are essentially working within design frameworks anyway — how is a template any different?

At the top of my portfolio homepage, you can see the multiple navigation options available, to address multiple potential hiring manager or visitor mindsets. Just above the fold are some of my more interesting case studies.

4. Use particular caution with non-disclosure content and projects.

In a past article, I discuss the perils of secret projects. I generally recommend early-career designers steer clear of secret projects, especially long ones, as it means you’ll be locked into that job for a long time with no portfolio updates (and let’s just hope you don’t get cancelled.) If your first project out of school is a secret project and you want to leave after a year or two, suddenly you’re interviewing for non-entry level jobs with an entry-level portfolio.

And even when an NDA project “wraps” for you, it can still take a year or two to hit market — or, worse, the nature of your employment means you cannot publicly disclose that you worked with that employer. If a key project in your portfolio falls into these categories, use particular caution:

DO NOT violate the terms of your non-disclosure agreement.

You never know who knows who and what will come back to haunt you — either privately or on the pages of Gizmodo. I could not tell prospective employers about my work on the Echo Look for 2+ years, but I still got hired back at Microsoft at 35% more interviewing on my prior Microsoft portfolio. What I DID do is describe the skills I’d attained and exercised during my time there. I also talked about my work on adjacent public projects, like the Echo. Yes, this even applies behind closed doors. Your prospective employer could get in a ton of legal trouble too if an idea you “leaked” influences their current work and they don’t realize it was protected information.

Scrub personally identifying information out of portfolio content.

It’ll take more time, but when posting images or deliverables publicly for any reason, obscure openly visible faces and people’s real names unless you have explicit permission to include them in your portfolio. Odds are your consent paperwork did not include portfolio use. It’s also probably best to avoid listing stakeholders by name.

Consider alternative ways to depict your skills.

You may have to get creative if the rest of your portfolio is light. Generic case studies where all NDA content is stripped out, homegrown projects that push similar skills forward, etc. I use my homepage to highlight several of my key skills, and for my book I have a dedicated page even though it’s not a project case study per se.

Be vigilant about passwords and access.

If you must password protect your portfolio, you must be vigilant to make sure (1) the people who need it have the password and (2) the people who don’t need it don’t have the password. Password in a resume can be risky, as resumes can end up on Internet aggregators. Password through recruiting agencies can get lost in email threads, and with tons of candidates we may just skip folks to whose materials we don’t have access.

Further down on my homepage, I highlight several of my most unique skills and use the highlights to link to either specific case studies or tag groups of articles.

5. Make intentional choices about format.

The age old question: Web portfolio or PDF/presentation? Sadly, the answer is generally: both. But if you must do 1, for me it’s the web portfolio.

A web portfolio is vastly more searchable, scalable, and dynamic. You can update it in real time when you find errata or decide you want to make changes. You can create multiple forms of navigation based on different visitor needs. You can use search engines to drive more recruiters to your content. And it is MUCH faster for hiring managers to look at your work, which is a Good Thing.

However, some folks don’t love the use of web portfolios during a portfolio review, which is typically a 60–75 minute session in a final interview loop where you walk interviewers through 1 or 2 of your projects in detail. I’ve been hired off of web portfolio review presentations before, but it certainly wasn’t the level of polish I was used to.

Using a presentation or PDF gives you more visual control, better storytelling and progressive disclosure, but file sharing and access becomes much more challenging. You’ll also potentially run into font or formatting issues across systems if you’re not using a PDF. But these files can’t easily be updated and can be harder to distribute. They also take longer to load than web portfolios in general.

My current preference is both: I have a comprehensive web portfolio, plus a deck of PowerPoint case studies I draw from for portfolio reviews based on the needs of the particular company I’m speaking to. I built the case studies up on an as-needed basis; I didn’t start in bulk. While I by no means think my portfolio is perfect (there are formatting sacrifices on the case study pages I have to make using this particular Wordpress theme), I’ve received numerous recruiter and hiring manager compliments about the portfolio, especially the organization. Keep in mind, though, I’m a late-stage designer and early-stage designers will have a much different portfolio approach by necessity.

If you choose ONLY a web portfolio, I would recommend emphasizing information architecture, visuals, and scannability so that it’s easier for you to use in presentations. Also, make sure you have a backup plan if you have issues accessing the internet on the day of your portfolio review.

If you choose ONLY a PDF/presentation portfolio, I recommend having it posted at a permanent URL you can update in place, so hiring managers are always downloading the most recent version. Ideally, this is not password protected, and NDA-restricted content is provided separately by request or in email.

Wrapping it all up

So, to summarize my top 5 pieces of general portfolio advice:

  1. Clearly position yourself in the context of the project.
  2. Help me see HOW you solve problems, not just WHAT you produce.
  3. Consider the information architecture of your portfolio site.
  4. Use particular caution with non-disclosure content.
  5. Make intentional choices about format.

I hope this helps you as you go about your career journey and consider the next steps that are right for you. You’re welcome to look at my own portfolio site, but please know — I don’t feel like a great example, and even sharing that link feels vulnerable. Because portfolios are vulnerable! You’re putting your thought process, your past work, your professional identity all out there ro be judged by your peers in a way most other industries don’t deal with. Your stress is normal. And the job market right now IS challenging, whether you’re new or a veteran. (If you haven’t read Dan Saffer’s piece on this, I recommend it for anyone in the design job market right now.)

While I’m flattered by the many folks who ask me about portfolio advice, I do not provide career or portfolio coaching at this time, but there are plenty of folks out there who do. You might choose to follow Sarah Doody or Nick Finck on Twitter, and I’ll comment here (or you can!) if there are other great resources to follow (especially POCs or other marginalized groups.).

Best of luck getting that next gig!

Cheryl Platz is an experienced design leader and writer, and is the author of Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences. She’s had just as much challenge working on her portfolio as you have, so don’t get discouraged — it’s a tough problem!

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Cheryl Platz
Ideaplatz

Designer, actress, teacher, speaker, writer, gamer. Author of Design Beyond Devices. Founder of Ideaplatz, LLC. Director of UX, Player Platform @ Riot Games.