“Great design DOES NOT speak for itself.”
In the last article, How to prepare a job winning graphic design portfolio, part 1, we learned how to map both your soft skills and your hard skills to your portfolio projects. In this post, we will look at how to dive deep into those projects, as well as what kind of narrative focal points to showcase when presenting your work.
How to showcase your skills
First, let’s talk about those skills you mapped from the previous post. Whether it is a soft skill or a hard skill, there are two vantage points you want to approach them from. Consider one of the skills you mapped to your projects.
This skill has both a “Big Idea” vantage point that you could potentially speak to, as well as an “Execution” vantage point that you can both show and speak to.
For the “Big Idea” vantage point, you want to think about how you might communicate the following:
In principle, how and why is a skill used?
How does it fit within the needs of a design workflow?
What are the best practices you should keep in mind when executing this skill?
On the “Execution” level, you might want to talk about the following:
How was the artifact generated? Was it in a program or done by hand? Why?
How was it implemented?
How did it inform the design decision process in the project?
Why this is important
When you speak to a skill from both vantage points, you demonstrate your knowledge in a way that says you understand both the parts of a design process, as well as the process as a whole.
Task
Go through your mapped skills and see if you can write up these points for each one. You don’t have to actually list these in your portfolio, but you want to be able to use them as talking points when presenting, so it is good to have thought them through in advance.
Note: It’s ok also to NOT understand a skill from all these vantage points. Just try to fill in the points above as best you can so you can communicate accurately where you are at in your design learning process.
The deep dive
When people are interviewing you for a job, their questions about you fall into two major categories. First, can you do the work? And second, how will you work with others? But most portfolios don’t really address these asks directly. The following sections cover what I believe should be present in a portfolio to tell the right depth of story.
1. Finished design work
Designers have a tendency to put the “polished foot” forward, so most of them tend to have a kind of narrative formula per project that looks like this:
State the design challenge/ State the solution/ Talk about their role on the project/ Show shiny polished design work.
This results in a portfolio with an emphasis on finished work, maaayyyybe with some design process artifacts like a UX wire flow thrown in.
On the surface this works, but the reality of a project tends to be much more complex and interesting. Showcasing only finished work with a hint of process is woefully incomplete.
So, what else should you include?
2. Research
I am (thankfully) beginning to see more research artifacts show up in graphic design portfolios. Not every design project begins with research about end users and market segments, but ideally it starts with some kind of research.
Whether it is qualitative research or just mood boards of pretty images and scribbles, put it into your portfolio. Anyone hiring you wants to know what you did to inform your decisions.
If it isn’t pretty, that is ok. Just have a link to it somewhere so you can bring it up to discuss when the question arises about your design process.
Task
Go through the design work in your portfolio that you want to show and think about what you can add to support it in terms of research.
If you don’t have much, can you reverse engineer some as an example of your process?
Or is there something you can show to demonstrate how you went from the broad strokes of information to a focused choice that moved the project forward?
3. Business impact and End User outcome
Things begin to get more interesting when you can speak to not just the design work, but also it’s impact on the end user as well as the business outcome.
Given the variety of project types and your experience level, this is not always possible. But even if you are fresh out of school and have no real clients, end users, or even potential clients, do the leg work and think about how your design solution might speak to these two points.
Real world design projects are almost always attached to these outcomes, and a designer should be able to speak to them.
Task
Identify how your design solution achieved business results (increased customer awareness, increased sales, changed position in market, etc.)
Identify how your design solution met end user’s needs (solved problem, created value, etc.)
The real deep dive: nitty & gritty
If we are to dive a bit deeper into the questions of “Can you do the work?” and “How will you work with others?”, we begin to think about questions like the following:
What challenges can you navigate?
What skills are you really bringing to the table?
How much of the design process have you been exposed to?
Your portfolio projects are all with a team, but how do you think as an individual?
These are the types of questions that every job interview digs into, but design portfolios rarely represent. To address these underlying questions, I have written up a list of the “nitty gritty” details that I have never seen visualized in a portfolio, but I feel could…nay…SHOULD be visually present per portfolio project.
Why? Because your potential employer is hiring you, not your project, and documenting yourself in the project in addition to the shiny results is a much better way of answering the questions on their minds.
Here is the list…
Ponder how you might account for these things, speak to them, and design them into the visual experience of your portfolio piece.
Visualizing soft skills
How will you show that you collaborated?
How can you visualize that you guided Junior designers?
What kind of artifact can you make to visualize your soft skills?
Example
Here is a sample way of visualizing a soft skill. In this case, collaboration between two parts of a team (Design and Dev) and a specific outcome in the middle.
Pivot points
Every project takes unexpected turns. How can you highlight and speak to the pivot points in a project that led you to your final outcome?
How did it impact the team?
How did it impact the final design?
Example
“We discovered that our end user really didn’t get value from a key feature and instead focused on another much more, so that shifted the main feature set.”
Red tape
No project is completely smooth sailing. Every project has either built in constraints that can be challenging, or some kind of obstacle usually shows up. I call it the red tape.
How can you highlight and call out barriers that were in your way and how you dealt with them?
How did that barrier lead to a more interesting design direction?
What did you learn?
Example
“The deadline got bumped so we shortened the sprint cycle. This lead to tighter team communication between design and dev.”
What would you do differently?
This question is almost always present in an interview. Interviewers know that you are often part of a team, but they want to know how you think as an individual.
Is there something you can add at the end of the project that accounts for this?
Can you go as far as designing a different artifact to demonstrate your vision?
“The project ended, but what I wanted to do was…”
The challenge…
My challenge to you is to not only recall and identify these details, but find ways to visually account for them in the flow of your portfolio project layout.
Ok– so that is the deep dive list for what you should consider in your portfolio. Did I miss anything? Leave a comment below!
Resources
I was contacted by the great folks over at Toptal - a design resource that I have found to be both useful and thoughtful every time I come across it. They put out a great article called and asked me to share - check it out:
Showcase Your Skills – How to Make a Portfolio
Another good resource with pro-tips and examples from the folks over at Pixpa:
