The problem with designer portfolios

Portfolios document and share design work. For recruiters, they're a quick way to screen. For designers, they're a stage to show off. So what's my gripe?

First, let's get this out of the way:

• This is my portfolio.
• One of the first posts on it is about how portfolios have problems.

That might look hypocritical. It's on purpose.

Portfolios are great at selling

Portfolios are brilliant at selling stories, through images and text. Showing and telling.

A lot of design is exactly that: communicating well, with whatever means it takes. So far, so good.

My problem is with the incentives the format creates. There are two of them. And then there's the big one.

Incentive 1: Pretty pictures win

Portfolios are great at showing visuals. That rewards beautiful mockups over thorough case studies.

I'm guilty of this too.

The trouble is that it favors designers who are good at graphic design, which is a small part of the job. And a lot of how a product looks is out of the designer's hands anyway:

• The company's brand
• The existing design system
• The skills of the frontend developers (if you judge the shipped product)

I know plenty of designers who are excellent at their job and still struggle to make things beautiful. Do portfolios help you find them? I'm not sure. I think they risk getting swept aside in screening.

Then again, maybe that's for the best. I wouldn't want to work somewhere that values visuals over results anyway. The problem is that it's harder to get through the door in the first place.

Incentive 2: Everything becomes an essay

A portfolio tells its story through visuals or text. Audio and video exist, but they're rare.

So the safe bet is good old text. And once you're writing, you need a lot of it to explain what you actually did. Too little, and the reader doesn't get enough context to make sense of it.

Writing all that context takes time. It also lowers the odds that the reader (who is skimming fifteen portfolios before lunch, let's be honest) will actually read it.

Good writers pull this off. Which means the format rewards people who are good at selling themselves in text. That leaves out a lot of great designers who communicate brilliantly in a room with actual humans.

The real problem

None of that is news. Here's my actual issue:

Portfolios don't cover the parts of design that are hard.

How do you show that you built good relationships with the people around you?

That you created trust and engagement in your team?

That you won over a skeptical stakeholder?

In my experience, most of the hard parts of design are people and politics. And they're really hard to put in a portfolio. Some designers with very shiny portfolios have also spent their time polishing artifacts rather than building exactly those skills.

There's a running joke that the best designers don't have time to update their portfolios. They're too busy doing real design work.

Four years later, I'd add: it's not really a joke.

So what do we do?

I still don't have a perfect answer. But if you're hiring, these have told me more than scrolling through mockups ever did:

• Ask the candidate to walk you through one project, including what went wrong.
• Ask about a conflict with a stakeholder and how it was resolved (or wasn't).
• Ask what they'd do differently next time. Reflection beats polish.
• Pay attention to the questions they ask, not just the answers they give.

And if you're a designer working on your portfolio: show your thinking, name your constraints, and give the people side of the work some room. Even one honest paragraph helps.

Thanks for reading. I still get a bit ranty sometimes.