While in the progress of hiring more talents to form up the new design structure, I have reviewed dozens of designer’s resumes and portfolios. I realized that most designers just put together all the works they’ve done before, try to make the portfolio as long as possible. And hope that it would sell themselves.

It certainly doesn’t work that way. I feel it is necessary to write down some notes about what I think is a good design portfolio.

Make it visually appealing

Yes I know I wrote the title as “Good Portfolio is Good Story”. However, the recruiter and hiring manager usually have busy calendars. If your portfolio looks boring, you already missed the opportunity to get their attentions.

Design is not only about making a nice picture, but making a nice picture is still a big part of design.

Plus there is the Aesthetic Usability Effect. A visually appealing portfolio definitely gives you higher chances to get to the next step.

Craft your narrative

Once you’ve got the attention from the reader, it is all about telling a good story.

Your portfolio serves the purpose of telling the story of yourself. Make sure you craft your story with good narratives. Think about your portfolio as a product and the readers as users, think about how they would read your story and what might interests them.

Pay attention to the information architecture. Highlight the key points as necessary, so that your readers can quickly scan through the story before they decide to dive into the details.

Tell me who you are

After going through the portfolio, your reader should be able to have a good picture of who you are and what can you do. What’s better is that you can specify it by yourself and support it with all the sample works in your portfolio.

I’m Winston Wolf, I solve problems

Write down the problem, the process, then the solution

When writing about your projects, always make sure to phrase the problems and/or the goals to achieve.

Tell the story about the process of how you approached to solve the problems. Sometimes also write down the mistakes you made along the way - don’t be surprised, the ability to summarize and reflect from the mistakes you made, is always a plus.

If applicable, also list out the results and impacts of your solution. Your reader is probably not going to dig into all the details and evaluate how good your solution is, but as the creator of the design solution, you should always be proud of what you delivered (otherwise why bother putting it in your portfolio?). Highlight the parts that you are mostly proud of, share the passion with your readers, even if they might not really care that much.

Specify your role

Take all the credits you deserved but don’t forget to mention your teammates. Often times we tend to highlight the projects that we worked on independently. It is true that these projects can highlight your professional skills. But in most cases it is as important for the hiring manager to understand how well you worked with your team.

You can highlight the moments when you showcased leadership, and be honest and clear with all the supports you got from your peers.

Better to have a website

Sending PDFs is okay, but as a digital designer, it is always a plus to have a dedicated website hosting all your works.

Just to make sure that you have optimized and tested the loading speed. Prepare backup solutions if necessary.

Don’t zip a folder with all the works you have done before

It is your job to highlight the best of yourself through the best of your works. Make it one single source of truth.

They could be good “read more” contents, but never use them as the portfolio itself.

Because it sucks.

Don’t RAR

It is year 2021, use zip if you have to compress file size.

Don’t reveal confidential contents

It is unprofessional.