A portfolio is essential to get hired these days for most design roles, and provides an insight into your personality, showcases your skills and talent, accomplishments alongside an evidence of your work. Consider designing your portfolio just as you would normally approach a design project: what’s it for, who would be looking at it, why do you need to setup one, and what do you aim to get out of it?
Case Studies Structure
Showcase the work that best represents what you want to do in a job. I recommend going with 3-5 case studies of your proudest work which showcases a breadth of your skillset and demonstrates cross-platform knowledge. Use a structured approach for these case studies and start off with providing a bit of a background context into each project. Craft this section as a story of a character wanting to accomplish a task, all the challenges faced, and your approach to solving these challenges. Discuss items like:
- What was the project about?
- Who were you designing for?
- What was the problem you were trying to solve?
- How did you go about solving this problem?
- Your role and specific contributions in the project.
- Rationale behind your design choices.
- Success metrics & outcomes.
Make use of research insights that went into this project, and how these insights ultimately informed your design decisions. Don’t be afraid to showcase wireframes, sketches, user flows, visual designs, interactive prototypes, whatever helps communicate your design and thinking process. Also, while I want to see your process, what’s really impressive is how you can share how a process helped you through a design problem and ultimately led to the outcome of your solution. Talk about the challenges of going forward with your chosen methodology, what were the outcomes and the design decisions that it ultimately influenced?
Additional Considerations
- Showcase any concepts and iterations that you might have explored, but didn’t make it to the final cut. This demonstrates creativity and your ability to flex your muscles without getting married to a single solution. Knowing when to make trade-offs and letting go is a core skill of a good designer.
- Pay special attention to the presentation of your visual designs and other details like grammar, punctuation, type, margins etc. If you don’t give extra care to your presentation, chances are you’ll be cutting corners in your day to day work as well.
- Structure your case studies in a way that it doesn’t induce boredom. I normally provide a sneak peak into the final visuals of the work very early on, rather than just adding a wall of text, to hook the reader in. Don’t make the reader wait all the way to the end to get to the good stuff, because chances are they won’t make it there.
- Talk a bit about your team structure as well. How did you collaborate with other partners in the team – with your fellow designers, research, product managers and engineers, to see your project from concept to final execution. It demonstrates your team collaboration skills, one which is highly regarded at many companies.
- I recommend setting up your portfolio as an online website rather than showcasing in a PDF format – for one, it’s easily searchable, shareable, and easy for you to maintain it. Some of you provided your Dribbble and Behance links to your work, and while I do think they are great for showcasing your general style and in-progress work, a standalone website gives you more control of the narrative you wish to present for your case studies.