Portfolio Design Tips

July 21, 2016

In the past couple of months I’ve gotten involved with hiring designers at Automattic (which is a pretty new and kind of weird experience for me). I’ve seen enough portfolios that I’m starting to get a feel for what’s effective and what misses the mark. Here are some tips:

Optimize your images

Don’t make me wait. Your images should be high-quality and retina-friendly, but they also shouldn’t take forever to load. If your design tool of choice doesn’t do the optimization for you, there’s a bunch of free tools you can use to whittle down your file size without losing too much quality. I want to see your big, beautiful portfolio examples, but I don’t want to have to wait for them to load forever.

Make your projects easy to browse

Should be intuitive, and yet… I’ve reviewed so many portfolios where it’s not easy to go from one project to the next. Simple navigation, whether it’s a grid of projects or even just a Back / Next link at the bottom of your project, is enough for me.

If you worked on a project with others, clearly state your role

Design is often collaborative. That’s awesome. But if you’re showing projects you worked on other designers (or art directors, etc.) try to be as explicit as possible about what part of the project you were responsible for. Don’t make whoever is viewing your portfolio try to guess which part is yours and which was done by someone else.

Write case studies

Show me your sketches and your process. In my opinion, the worst thing you can do is just throw a bunch of screenshots or mockups on your site with no sort of explanation or guidance. What were the project goals? Did you accomplish them? What was your process like? Why did you make these decisions? It doesn’t need to be an essay — even a paragraph is fine — but it needs to get me into your head and see the project from your perspective. A couple screenshots isn’t going to do that.

Remove your older projects

I’ve seen a lot of work from 2011-2013. It usually looks outdated, because it is. Just cut it. If you’re worried about not having enough work, spend more time on your recent examples and work them into case studies. Older or mediocre designs bring down the overall quality of your portfolio. It’ll be stronger without them, I promise.

I know this is probably kind of ironic, given I haven’t updated my own portfolio in quite some time and it’s pretty sad and outdated. I’ve honestly been thinking about redoing my site and removing my portfolio in favor of just my blog — but that’s a topic for another time.

PS: Automattic is hiring Product Designers and Marketing Designers!

One response to “Portfolio Design Tips”

Davide ‘Folletto’ Casali

January 18, 2018

Just six seconds. This is what is considered the time it takes to recruiters to look at curriculum vitae. Luckily, our hiring team spends far more time evaluating the candidates we get, not just because designers also have a portfolio to present, but also because we want to be sure to hire the best. This however doesn’t mean we don’t like to make a decision to move to the interview quickly.

Put yourself in the shoes of the person hiring
Why not applying your design skills designing your CV and portfolio with them in mind? What are their goals? Hiring for sure, but what are they looking for? Is there any focus that emerges from the job ad or from the kind of company you are applying to?
When I do hiring for a product designer or marketing designer position, I assure you there isn’t anything more frustrating of a designer that presents only really high quality visual designs. As the hiring person, I’m now torn: the visual design is excellent, but what if that’s all this designer has to offer? I want to give you the benefit of doubt, but… am I willing to take the risk? The answer is usually no, as other candidates clearly explain all I need to see and it won’t waste anybody time. Unless I’m hiring specifically for graphic design, visual-only portfolios aren’t an option.

People think that design is styling. Design is not style. It’s not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.
— Paola Antonelli

What we are looking for is the whys, the reasoning, what makes your work excellent, what you learned in the process – and also what makes your approach different on top of it.

What do we want to see in portfolios?
Experienced designers, especially product designers, have a large number of skills that are hard to communicate, and the visual design alone doesn’t even scratch the surface.
That’s why good case studies are fundamental in showing you work and how you think. Every designer knows this. But how to make that case study show who you are in a way that is efficient and time-aware?
Your role. Knowing about an amazing project is nice, but every single sentence should be written from your perspective. It’s important to describe briefly what were your responsibilities, how you collaborated with the team and the client, and what were the things you did.

Don’t — be too abstract, talk just about the project, take ownership of parts you didn’t do.

Do — be clear about what you did, how, with whom, how you work with them is relevant too, and give credit.

Process is certainly one of the most important things: where did you start? How did you get to the end? This doesn’t require to write a lot – no time, remember? – but enough to be specific to the project and still be clear about the steps.

Don’t — just mention the labels of the process, or just skip over it: “After research we did…”.

Do — say your role, what you did, how the work changed the direction of the project. Show some numbers if you can. One sentence or two is often enough.

Design is intelligence made visible
— Alina Wheeler

Show don’t tell. Surely the description of what the diagram is about is helpful, but showing example deliverable of each step is useful.

Don’t — add full deliverables. We won’t have time to read it all, and you probably wrote them for a different kind of audience.

Do — give us an highlight, show one page and tell us why it’s important.

No-style. Having a personal, characteristic style preference is amazing, and we love seeing how you express it. At the same time, are you also able to stay within the rules, guidelines, and patterns of an existing brand?

Don’t — show the same visual style everywhere.

Do — show how you read a different brand or design guideline.

Mobile is important. Sometimes it’s hard to be assigned on a project that is fully mobile, and not every business have a mobile app. We get it. But we also get that mobile is a hugely important part of design, and we’d like to see how you included that even in a normal website design.

Don’t — show only a single type of device: not all mobile, not all desktop.

Do — show us variety, and how you were able to consider mobile even if it wasn’t part of the brief.

Each single case study can include all of the above and still be very easy and quick to read. It doesn’t have to get into all the details, just in the ones that matter. Guide us through the portfolio. Copywriting is a design skill too, right?

There are always Design constraints, and these often imply an ethic.
— Charles and Ray Eames

These are important things we look in Automattic when we review the portfolios, but as you can see, these are also general principles of good portfolios. Even if you’re not applying to work with us – why not? – you can reuse these tips.

Read more

“Portfolio Design Tips” by Mel Choyce

“Creating a great portfolio site” by Mel Choyce

“Key phrases” tweet and discussion by Jared Spool

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