Your design portfolio is in a pile with hundreds of other ones and the reviewer is in a hurry. How does it look?

Published in

UX Collective

5 min readMay 24, 2016

Last night I caught Marc Hemeon’s Periscope stream (video at the bottom). It was an educational experience.

Marc is a co-founder of Design Inc., a new (still stealthy) marketplace startup where designers make up the supply side. They opened up submissions to the world in January and designers, hopeful to work with startups sourced from a high-quality network, offered up their portfolios, personal websites, and links to be considered for the opportunity.

Live streaming app Periscope’s vision is to give you a way to see the world through someone else’s eyes, and in doing so, maybe spark a bit more empathy for each other. For me, Marc’s session last night fulfilled that vision.

Why was it so educational? The purpose of this session was to view and rank design portfolios as fast as possible because there were over 500 submissions! With so many to process, that means each individual designer gets very little time for assessment.

Seeing your own portfolio through that perspective is illuminating.

With a growing global workforce of designers, the startups you want to work with get lots of applicants, so while they may sometimes get more time than Marc was able to allot to each portfolio, the reviewers are likely thinking similar thoughts and having similar first reactions.

These reviews were for a specific purpose, so some criteria may not always apply. For example, Design Inc. is using Stripe for payments, which doesn’t handle payments in some countries, so that eliminated designers who might have otherwise qualified. That’s instructive, too, though since real world hiring scenarios often have similar constraints.

How do you think you rank on a 1–5 scale where 5 is world-class, experienced, and showing an amazing portfolio?

Takeaways

Here are a few key lessons I learned watching Marc surfing through links.

Your links have to work.
If links you submit don’t load or give the reviewer a dead end, it’s game over — the browser window gets closed and you get a 0. Don’t let that happen! Or don’t bother submitting.
Don’t send a link to a ‘coming soon’ portfolio.
If your portfolio isn’t available and you don’t have anything else to show, you might as well not bother. That’s a huge motivator to us all — creating portfolios is a known challenge and part of being a designer is never feeling like your work is done or as good as you’d like it to be. Get over yourself long enough to crank out something.
Show enough work to prove your quality.
Marc scored a bunch of designers a 3 for having “not enough there”. Not enough work to judge by means rounding down rather than rounding up, so be warned.
Show a wide range of work.
In the case of hiring for agency-style work, diversity in styles and media shows you’re capable of working with multiple types of clients. In general, it also helps prevent rejection because your style doesn’t line up with the reviewer’s preferences (ex.: everything you show is a specific purple the reviewer happens to despise). Any work you show should be strong, so the point isn’t to show diversity at the cost of quality.
Show your best self.
If you’re good at storytelling, use it! Personal websites offer you the freedom to showcase your design strengths. There are lots of different types of designers (there was a UX-centric portfolio reviewed, for example), so it makes sense that portfolios can take all kind of shapes. Choose your format wisely.
Make it obvious what you’re great at.
Are you great at UX, visual design, logos, branding…? Sweet! Make that super obvious with just a glance at your portfolio.
Don’t show bad UX.
Design is how things work, not just how they look, so make sure that if you show UI screens that they imply good usability. This might also mean that you need to show more screens or even use text to explain why decisions were made and the thought process behind them. It’s good if the reviewer can imagine using the UIs you’re showing.
Don’t hide behind clever layouts.
When Marc sees those clever 3D UI screen layouts — you know, the ones with drop shadows on impossibly thin glass surfaces and stuff that are so popular on Dribbble — and he thinks, “What are they hiding?!” He notes those presentation tricks hide bad UX. 😂 Great insight.
Big clients = trust.
If you’ve worked with some notable or larger companies/brands, this lends you some cred and shows you’re trustworthy for clients of that caliber.
Shipping counts big.
If you’ve shipped to the App Store or similar, that means you’ve gone through the whole creation life cycle required to ship a real product. That’s what Marc was reviewing for, so it makes sense that he values that.
Playfulness is cool, but not sufficient.
Marc enjoyed playfulness in UX (there was a funky logo kaleidoscope thingy that stole the show for a moment), but there needs to be substance in addition to that or else it’s not clear that you have all the skills required to ship real design.
Keep your portfolio somewhat up-to-date.
Marc was a bit quick to dock points for dated styles in work shown. Some of that was personal preference, but if your portfolio clearly hasn’t been updated in 5 years, that makes you harder to trust to work on a client project today. So much changes in design in 5 years — the tools we use, the devices we design for, the markets and customers we serve, the paradigms of interaction, etc. Marc was forgiving of this when it seemed like a designer was heads down working a job at a company, but it does make you harder to judge. Again, it means rounding scores down, not up.