A portfolio for designers is much like rice for Asians. I grew up eating rice three times a day, and it is an absolute staple that you simply cannot function without. Everybody also has a say on how to cook a perfect rice, thinking theirs is the best. Much like people’s opinions on portfolios.
If you send a job application or a curriculum vitae without a portfolio attached in our industry, hundred percent guarantee that you will get rejected or ghosted.
It is supposed to be your lifeline, a wonderful array of blissful projects you have done in the past that you were proud of (or perhaps quietly not so proud of), framed with a design process as solid as a diamond (maybe not double-diamond-worthy, but still). They will pressure you to make your case studies as shiny like a STAR… I mean, that framework.
You polish it constantly (like a diamond that it’s supposed to be), you try to make it perfect, you craft it into your definitive hero journey, and somewhere along the line, you hope it will miraculously attract interviews or secure a lucrative job offer. It’s like writing your own movie script… where you are the only hero.
In the middle of polishing it, you inevitably find all sorts of conflicting advice online about what constitutes a good portfolio.
One camp will swear you must show every messy whiteboard sketch and write case studies that are 60 to 80 percent text to prove exactly how your thought process works. The next will tell you that nobody actually reads; some publications warn that hiring managers apply a fast mental filter, often deciding your fate in the first five to fifty-five seconds, meaning if it isn’t brutally skimmable, you are dead in the water.
The aesthetic advice is just as split.
Some insist that UX is about systems thinking and it is perfectly fine if your visuals are not Dribbble-perfect, some warn that the visual test happens in seconds—if your typographic balance or spacing is off, it is an instant red flag and they assume your actual product work will be sloppy, too.
The advice on volume and platforms is just as maddening.
You are instructed to strictly follow the “3 Case Study Rule” because quality over quantity reigns supreme, but simultaneously warned by the Nielsen Norman Group and others that if you do not show a wide variety of skills—like complex B2B SaaS or mobile apps—you will look too junior.
You are pressured to code a bespoke site to showcase your dedication to the craft (and your personal brand), only to be told that spending weeks on a custom site is a massive waste of time and a simple Notion page was all you ever needed.
Expectations genuinely differ based on the reviewer. Because recruiters, design managers, and product managers are all looking for completely different things, the only universal truth is that you can never satisfy everyone, and your portfolio will inevitably annoy somebody.
Then, some career coaches and industry influencers will loudly tell you that it is all about the business outcomes. Tell me about posts comparing “dead-end” portfolios with listing just tasks vs. “amazing” portfolios with business outcomes, and people’s eyes glow like crazy.
“Ah, this is what it should be! This is what answering to stakeholder expectations should be like,” I murmured myself just past midnight.
They will demand that you show hard business metrics and conversion rates for every single screen you touched. No number, no show. No number, game over.
They will tell you never to say “we” when describing teamwork, insisting that you must say “I” to take full credit for the success. Of course, we live in a world of individual performances. After all, this interview is for you, right… you are the star, you will get paid for your skills and experiences.
Confusingly, a completely different crowd will tell you not to follow frameworks at all because you will look like a cookie cutter candidate who lacks original thought and personality.
Career coaches will happily sell thousands of dollars in courses to make sure you craft a flawless presentation while promising to fix your interview skills in the process.
I have to admit something embarrassing here as someone who has been designing for over fifteen years. I am terrified of my own portfolio, and it is currently sitting in a state of some neglect. There was a time a few years ago when I was caught in a sudden restructuring, and I realised with a sinking heart that I had absolutely no access to the design files I had been pouring my soul into for the past three years. I sat there staring at a revoked Google Workspace screen, feeling entirely stripped of my professional identity. Lucky I had some access to Figma.
We sit in these companies struggling with how to collect the best of our stories, wondering what to do if a project is not end to end, or how to frame our contribution if we only worked on one tiny feature. We agonise over what to write if we only focused on the user research phase for a project we deeply loved, or what to say when we honestly do not know what the final revenue numbers were.
This anxiety of losing your work is not an isolated feeling, especially in our current climate. In recent years, the tech industry has seen a staggering number of job cuts, and many professionals have found themselves locked out of their laptops within minutes of receiving a cold severance email. A comprehensive tracker of industry workforce reductions highlights just how abruptly these transitions occur, leaving workers scrambling to salvage their personal records.
When you wait for a project to be completely finished and perfectly wrapped in a bow before documenting it, you run the very real risk of losing your access to the raw materials entirely. The pressure to create the ultimate, comprehensive case study often prevents us from saving the messy, beautiful work in progress that actually tells the true story of our design decisions.
The great irony of all this agonising over perfect frameworks and business outcomes is that recruiters and hiring managers are completely overwhelmed and barely have the time to read your beautiful prose. We spend weeks writing thousands of words detailing every sticky note in our double diamond process, yet eye tracking research on hiring behaviors shows that recruiters spend an average of just over seven seconds scanning a resume or profile before making an initial decision. They are skimming for recognisable brands, specific skill sets, and a general sense of visual competence. If they are only glancing at your work for a matter of seconds, it makes absolutely no sense to delay shipping your portfolio for six months just because you cannot figure out how to code a custom animated loading screen.
This brings me to the absolute trap of over-engineering your personal website. You know you lack the technical skills to code a complex website from scratch, so you might try your hand at vibe coding with an AI assistant, but the result still feels lacking and clunky. You end up spending countless hours hacking away, engaging in endless trial and error with platforms like Squarespace or Framer, and maybe even dabbling painfully with HTML and CSS. Then you completely lose your momentum and the portfolio remains unpublished in your drafts folder. This kind of paralysis is a well-documented psychological phenomenon, as comprehensive studies on perfectionism clearly show that setting impossibly high standards for yourself directly leads to severe procrastination and increased psychological distress. You are essentially punishing yourself for not being a senior frontend developer when your actual job is product design.
You know what you need to do right now, which is to ignore all of that noisy advice from the internet.
I am not going to give you a rigid framework either, but I can assure you from my years of reviewing candidates that the best portfolio is the one you are comfortable with, and most importantly, the one that is actually done. I know that you would hate to read another tips and tricks.
Being comfortable with your portfolio means it is a presentation you can genuinely vouch for in a quiet room. You can include the necessary baselines like the outcomes and the process, but if you are not comfortable with the narrative, you need to forget about it entirely. You have to be able to say with quiet pride that you know the ins and outs of the work, including the oohs and aahs of the specific challenges you faced. It is something where, beneath all the inherent imperfections of corporate software development, you managed to find a sliver of meaningful impact that you think is beautiful. Sure, the project might have technically followed a rigid double diamond process, but the interviewers really just want to see the diamond in you. It is perfectly fine if your presentation does not completely align with the expectations of every single company you interview with. You just have to make it yours.
The concept of being done simply means you have accepted your limitations in technical ability and time. I have seen incredibly talented designers prioritise speed to market by simply building a clean Notion page or creating nicely formatted PDF documents linked from a basic landing page (I do, too). You need to ship it first and perfect it later, unless you have the rare luxury of being able to work on it full time for half a year without financial worry. If you do have that luxury, then I am perfectly fine if you spend time deliberately tinkering with tooling and carefully crafting custom code, and maybe brag about it on social media (and LinkedIn, just to be sure). But for the vast majority of us trying to survive in this industry, the priority must be to get your work out into the world so you can actually apply for jobs and feed your family.
At the end of the day, it does not matter nearly as much what the loud voices on social media say you should do. You can use their advice as a loose baseline if you want, but ultimately your portfolio has to be something that feels personal and manageable for you. Allow yourself to let go of the impossible standards that are keeping you stuck in draft mode.
Make it fun, make it shine in your own quiet way, and above all else, make it done.
I hope you find the grace to forgive yourself for not having a perfect case study, and I wish you a very peaceful weekend away from the endless glow of your screens.
Oh, and I hope you get that job soon. Cheers.
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Consider subscribing, you will get at least a weekly update on things related to alternative views on UX. This blog is an attempt of me to refute, challenge or refresh what I’ve learned and observed about UX design as a career and industry, throughout my 15+ years career as a product designer. Read more about me, or visit my UX portfolio site.