Chapter 16 – You Need a Beautiful and Meaningful Portfolio

You cannot have an ugly design portfolio.

Period. Absolutely unacceptable.

“But I have great case studies!” Doesn’t matter. Make it look better.

“But I’m primarily a UX designer.” That doesn’t forgive ugly. Make it look better.

“But so-and-so has an ugly website.” You are not them. Make it look better.

“But the experiences are great!” Experience is important, yes, but another UX designer cared and made their portfolio look good, so you just lost another job. Make it look better.

One of a designer’s greatest assets is having taste. You may not know much about architecture, but you could probably gauge which builder cared more than another. Similar to any type of craft or art, there is an element of taste that you will instinctively know when something is made with care and could be considered on some level “good.”

Accordingly, if you honestly look at your work, website, or portfolio, you should be able to gauge whether or not it is good enough to impress a client or employer. If you’re having a hard time, compare yourself to your contemporaries and competitors. How good does their stuff look? Does your work compete with theirs? If not, work hard to improve it as best you can.

You have to be honest with yourself if you’re going to improve. Even if your skill set hasn’t reached the level it needs to, having an honest evaluation of your portfolio will give you an end goal to strive for. Honesty about your quality is key.

What if you worked on a real-life project and the outcome was not amazing? Final design results can feel out of your hands sometimes, and despite knowing a design was not optimal, it gets released to the public. This can happen for many unavoidable reasons, such as higher-ups without great vision, timelines that were too short, or various other constraints. It can be frustrating to have the great effort you’ve put in not result in an outwardly beautiful example of your capability, especially when you want to have a demonstrable example to showcase.

But this actually presents an excellent opportunity to showcase your creativity and tenacity.

Present the project as it actually ended, warts and all, but also present a redesigned version that is up to your standard. Explain, kindly, that due to constraints the team pulled together and was able to output this version. However, given more time and resources, this is how the design and experience could be further improved, and here is the thinking around that.

Imagine the reaction of the person reviewing this. This designer worked together with the team under duress to achieve a goal. Putting the team first, they showed flexibility and sacrifice. But they have a strong will to achieve the best possible result, and the suggested designs are so much better.

This is your portfolio, and you have complete control over everything that is in it. There is no reason you should let a substandard version exist within it because of how a previous project ended. Don’t lie or cover up the reality, but do the work to show what it could have been if you were able to use all of your design capabilities.

Are most of your delivered projects a bit on the ugly side? Then make up a bunch to show your capabilities!

Challenges such as the “100 Days of Design” can bolster your portfolio and expose you to areas you haven’t ventured into before. Design an app, layout a dashboard, construct fictional movie posters or screens.

Don’t allow your front-facing representation of yourself be a victim to bad past experience or terrible visuals. Take control of it, and strive to have a stunning body of work you’ll be proud to present.

Have a Meaningful Portfolio

Now that your portfolio looks good, another key ingredient is ensuring it matters. Deeper than the visuals, does it show how you’ll be an asset to the team? Having beautiful work will reassure the viewer that you are capable of output, but it’s equally important now to show them you’ll help the business and have an impact.

Here you should avoid writing massive 10,000-word essays about the project and its trajectory. Does a hiring manager or business owner have the time to dissect a long dissertation about a previous job? Or would they be much more impressed with an impact summary of who this was for, why it matters, and how you got there?

On “how I got there,” be brief and powerful. A designer’s process is not as impressive as many seem to think it is. When the results are amazing, how you got there is of comparatively little importance. If the design fails to convert, it doesn’t matter if you lead a six-month cross-team brainstorming session. If you increased conversions by 300 percent, I don’t care if you did it in your pajamas standing on your head. Showcasing process is better left to impressing upon the viewer that, thanks to it, you consistently deliver results rather than the process taking center stage itself.

Think how impactful and enticing those types of headlines could be:

With this design implemented, we were able to:

 

• Increase conversion by 300 percent.
• Increase time spent on site by twenty minutes.
• Reduce support calls by 50 percent.

 

When you have a beautiful design, make it meaningful by succinctly showing how you thought through the problem, some approaches you took to best empathize with all stakeholders, how you worked through challenges with the team, and the overall impact your work produced. But don’t waste the readers’ time.

A note of caution when writing these summaries: It’s funny how often a design ends up looking like Netflix, Pinterest, or Apple. For all of the long-winded musings on process and ideation, we designers often fall back on known conventions and leverage-proven interactions. It can be a bit insincere to wax poetic about the creative process when the result looks like a Pinterest clone.

You are a designer. You are not allowed to have an ugly portfolio. You are a great designer. You are not allowed to have a meaningless portfolio.