Being a designer means being able to show how you are able to take ambiguous problems and design successful solutions for customers, and the most direct way to do that is through your portfolio. A strong portfolio will increase your changes of catching the eye of a hiring manager.

As you begin to design or update your portfolio, a common theme that will come up is storytelling: what is the narrative you’re trying to share that convey the strengths you have as a designer? It’ll be important to keep this in mind to help inform which case studies to include in your portfolio and why.

Design your portfolio

Once you defined what strengths you want to highlight & the projects that will help you do that, you are ready to actually create your portfolio. For each case study, you want to make sure you’re covering the following:

1. The problem(s) you were trying to solve, from the business and human perspective.
2. The solution, ideally showing a prototype or other visual artifact to show visual and interaction design craft.
3. The outcome, including business metrics and solved human problems

One technique that can help get you started is writing out your case studies. Open up whatever you write with best and start typing out everything you’ve done in a timeline format for each project. Once you’ve done that, focus on condensing, reformatting, and editing your project timeline until it becomes a story.

As your editing the projects, keep in mind that this will be the narrative to inform both your online and in-person portfolio. You can’t talk about everything, so what are the highlights? What were the impactful parts you contributed to? How do each of these case studies contribute to how I’m trying to portray of myself as a designer?

Your Online Portfolio

When presenting your work online, the work will have to explain itself. A recruiter or hiring manager will have accessed your portfolio link (most likely through Linkedin or Google) and won’t have any context. At the same time, they are probably going through hundreds of portfolios, so how will you stand out?

In general, some common sections to add in order to provide more context about a project includes:

• A short summary of your process.
• A competitive analysis used to inform your design.
• A heuristic review, if you used (or deviated from) established design processes.
• User research, including user personas, user stories, affinity diagramming, usability testing, etc.
• Any combination of sketches, flow diagrams, wireframes, design specs, prototypes, etc.
• A retrospective (what went well or could have gone better).

When considering your audience, it’ll be important to be able to convey a story that highlights the most impactful moments during a project upfront. As you’re going through your case studies, ask yourself, “how could I describe this case study in 500 words or less?” Or another technique is to highlight the project success & takeaways before going into a linear timeline.

In the end, the goal of the online portfolio is to give the recruiter just enough confidence in your skills to reach out to you for an initial phone screen.

Here are a few examples of strong online portfolios. They're not all perfect; some show strong visual craft but don't talk about outcomes while others don't clearly state the problem being solved. But each highlights aspects of a good portfolio:

• https://austinknight.com/
• http://roogud.com/index.html
• https://www.yukiasakura.com/
• http://lilyannadesign.com/

Your In-Person Portfolio

The In-person portfolio will essentially be your online portfolio converted into a presentation format. Your slides should mirror how you’ll be presenting your narrative, so you’ll need to design your slides in a way that introduces you and highlights your work.

Introduction

At the beginning of the portfolio review, you’ll want to talk a bit about yourself before going into your work. This could look like some slides that describe who you are as a person, any interests you have, or any facts about you as a designer. These introductions are an opportunity to make a great first impression and let the hiring committee understand who’s presenting to them. Here are some questions to help consider your introduction:

• What do you spend your free time doing?
• What are you passionate about outside of work?
• What's a weird fact about you?
• What motivates you?
• Is there anything about your process or principles that differentiates you as a designer?

Case study format

It’ll be important to structure your presentation in a way that is easy to follow. You’ll also have to consider that with a fixed duration to present your work, you will only have time for at most 3 case studies.

Case study 1

This should be a big, meaty project and should highlight your best skills as a designer. You should convey that you worked cross functionally across the entire design process, from defining the strategy and frameworks for how to think about the problem with product managers to building the solution with engineers. Whenever you highlight collaboration, it’ll be important to be clear about what your contribution was. You should spend a majority of the portfolio review on this project.

Case study 2

This should be a smaller project, or only focus on one part of a larger project. The audience should already have a sense for your process from the first project, so you can spend less time on that. You should still be sure to cover the problem, the solution, and the outcome, but instead of walking through all of your contributions, highlight different skills or outcomes that may not have been addressed in your first project.

Case study 3

Depending on how in-depth you go with your first two projects, there may not even be time to go into your last project. Regardless, it will be helpful to have a third project to prepare to highlight a different strength you have as a designer.

This could be a single slide with a prototype - it’s the metaphorical mic drop. For example: “Oh yeah, and with a few weeks left before the project deadline, we designed and developed a companion Apple Watch app. It received 30,000 downloads and led to a 3% increase in our business goal.”

Preparing your case study slides

Each case study, though different in depth, can generally follow the same format.

Set helpful context

Before going into any case study, there should be some explanation on the project. This portion can be short, but it should help the hiring committee better understand the work you did. Some bullets you can include are:

• Team members
• Project duration
• Your contributions

Highlight key decisions and collaboration

When thinking of how to prepare to talk about your case studies, you shouldn’t think of preparing the entire project timeline in a slide format. Not only would this take too long, but this won’t engage the hiring committee.

You want to show your audience that you were able to evolve your work in a meaningful way. Some questions that can get you started:

• How did you arrive at the final design?
• What were some ways that your drove alignment or progress?
• Were there any constraints or major pivots that affected the design?
• How did you work with cross-functional stakeholders to influence your designs?
• Were there any unique circumstances or events that helped the project succeed?

As you craft your case study narrative, make sure you also highlight the work you did! Show any design artifacts, prototypes, or deliverables that showcase your craft.

Impact

It’ll be important to wrap each case study with how the project actually went. Did you solve the problem you were trying to solve? Show the overall outcomes of project completion, which can look like key metrics, business goals, or takeaways.

Even if the project wasn’t a success within context, this can be a good time to mention why this case study is important to you as a designer and representing your strengths.

Often the in-person portfolio review is the beginning of a full day of interviews. Therefore the goal of this portfolio is to give the interviewers as much positive signal as possible that you are a strong product designer. It will set the stage for the rest of the interviews.

Often the in-person portfolio review is the beginning of a full day of interviews. Therefore the goal of this portfolio is to give the interviewers as much positive signal as possible that you are a strong product designer. It will set the stage for the rest of the interviews.

Closing

Once you’ve closed out your presentation, what do you want the hiring committee to leave with? What slide(s) do you need to help you express that? For example, you can have a simple yet impactful ending that has a few bullets on how the case studies you highlighted make you a great fit for their team.

You can follow these general formats to help you start your case study drafting, but at the end of the day being able to show your designs as a story will be the key differentiator for you amongst other candidates.

Take a look at these different resources to get started:

• Use this Figma template to get started
• Here’s a full presentation example from Kelby

Tips & common mistakes

• Show, don’t tell! On your online portfolio, use large visuals (especially prototypes) to really exemplify strong craft. Only use words if you have to.
• Avoid large blocks of text. Similar to the above, optimize paragraphs for quick reading
• Consider your brand. It will be more professional and memorable when your resume, online portfolio, in-person portfolio, or anything related to you are branded similarly. This also helps determine stylistic choices around your portfolio.
• Don’t over-design your portfolio. As much as a portfolio is an opportunity to showcase your skill as a designer, the medium itself should represent a blank canvas to highlight your work. Too much embellishment or extra design elements will detract from your case studies.