Product/UX Design
What Should a Junior Product/UX Designer’s Portfolio Prioritize?
3 portfolio priorities to focus on as a junior product designer.
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When it’s time to make or remake a product design portfolio, many designers struggle to create an effective collection of work that leave a strong impression on hiring managers. Typically, the majority of advice you find tackles a top‐level understanding of well‐made portfolios. I’m sure we’ve all run across a version of this list before: avoid quantifying your ability with tools (I’m a 90% Figma expert), develop detailed case studies listing your exact process, use your portfolio as a space to explain your unique background, and so on. While these top‐level recommendations have some objective truth to them, you may find that focusing on them won’t meaningfully impact your portfolio.
There are some foundational pillars to good junior product designer portfolios that are rarely discussed. Let’s take a look at some of these deeper principles that may help you approach your portfolio differently.
1. Show that you know what good design looks like.
It’s normal for us to perceive good portfolios as collections of work that are unique by nature, and that push the bounds of visual abilities and design thinking. As junior designers, we learn most from the things we see every day: brands we admire, designers we follow, and a constant flow of media that shape our inspirations. It can therefore be tempting to work on portfolio pieces that showcase this next generation of design, but the truth is, demonstrating a more standardized approach to design holds greater value for a junior designer.
If you can incorporate the patterns and guidelines of well‐known design systems into your work, then you have shown that you understand why these popular systems work so well in today’s top products and applications. If you synthesize these popular design systems, you’ll note that they share many elements that are the building blocks of timeless design, and therefore, good design.
If a company has UX maturity, then the hiring manager will care about how well you can integrate into their existing design philosophy. This means, integrating into the company’s design system. A portfolio with strong attention to “basic” design will be more beneficial than one that tries to break those principles.
This is not to say that you should not flex your creative muscles and expand on standard design thinking. But to push past something, we must demonstrate that we also understand what we’re pushing past.
How can you apply this to your portfolio?
Work on projects with the intention of pulling patterns and properties from popular design systems. Once you have something finalized, take a step back and analyze why different parts of your design work. It is in understanding the harmony and relationships of a design system’s elements that provide designers with strong skillsets that they can apply to their day‐to‐day tasks, but also help push them further towards becoming more experienced designers.
Design systems to get you started
2. How you present is as important as what you present.
Anecdotally, the most common question I’ve found at the beginning of portfolio building is
What should I build my portfolio on?
Should it be a website or a deck? Should I host my own domain or use a freemium option? Squarespace or Wix or Adobe Portfolio? It’s no secret that hiring managers have biases regarding what they prefer, but we are again falling into the trap of a top‐level understanding of our portfolio. What matters above all is how we present the content with the medium we’ve chosen.
Your portfolio is part of the collection of work that you’re presenting. It’s a meta-project to display other projects. This means we need to treat portfolios with the same care as any other project.
We are all limited in our capabilities at any given time. You may not currently have the web dev experience needed to code a website from scratch, or the financials to host a custom domain, but what you can always control is delivering a portfolio that is free of clutter, that has quick access to your work, and demonstrates your qualifications without overcomplicating your content.
Your portfolio will be something you always go back to. I’ve gone through countless iterations, always second‐guessing what I previously built, and that shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing. I built V1 and acquired new tools and methodologies to help implement V2, continuing this pattern until V∞.
So… how should you present it?
Because we are treating our portfolio as another product to be designed, we can take a step back and identify who we are designing it for, this will allow us to identify some key elements to incorporate into our portfolio.
Hiring managers are normally dealing with hundreds of applications at a time, going through each one and gauging whether an applicant is meeting the desired requirements for a junior-level design role. This means that their time is limited for each portfolio they visit. What can we do to maximize the amount of efficient time they spend on your portfolio?
Allow them to quickly access your work.
When a portfolio is opened, the hiring manager should be able to view your work almost immediately. If it’s not part of the hero section, or the start of the second slide, then it should be right under the fold of both. You should try to avoid blocking that path with fillers that are not aligned with the purpose of your portfolio. Let your work be the top of the funnel, and everything else is what the work leads them to.
Incorporate more white space.
An almost complimentary addendum to the point above, don’t clutter your space with extras and assets for the sake of having more. White space allows attention to be drawn to important elements. What’s most important is your work, let that stand out above all. This idea can be carried into your case studies too, giving your text, images, and layouts room to breathe. Your project may be familiar to you, but new eyes need time to process what they’re seeing.
Be intentional with the kind of role you’re after.
Although junior designers are more often than not, generalists, it’s always important to demonstrate where your passion lies in the ever‐growing space of design, whether it’s a certain industry or specialty you want to focus on. Don’t tell visitors your passion, instead, show it through the work you’ve decided to present.
Portfolios that display a wide variety of disciplines quickly find themselves lost in the emphasis they’re trying to make. As the hiring manager, it will be hard to gauge what you’re striving to achieve in your practice, and where your strengths lie.
3. Don’t stress over the perfect Design Process.
There’s a certain love/hate relationship that goes along with design processes. On one hand, they are the structure that guides us through the intricate stages of product design, making sure we hit all the requirements of a well-established product. On the other hand, they are rigid and sometimes arbitrary in the specific problem we are trying to solve. And there’s just so many of them.
A design process shouldn’t be a requirement, but another tool that you can bend and twist to your needs. Case studies that are strict with
Define → Research → Ideate → Design → Iterate → Develop
miss the purpose of design processes in real-world applications. Sometimes the affordability isn’t there to hit every point along the process, sometimes we can skip certain stages, or put less focus on them. Design processes should be used to help us pass the next obstacle of the problem we are solving, not cause more obstacles along the way.
Junior designer portfolios often suffer from forcing stages of a process when they may not necessarily be vital to telling the story of how you solved the given problem. A case study shouldn’t be a list of stages you completed (I did stage 1, then stage 2, then stage 3…) it should tell the story of a problem you tried to solve, the obstacles you faced, how you pushed past them (or didn’t), the results of your effort, and what you learned.
Always revisit your portfolio
Remember that the portfolio you work on today will not be the one you’ll have forever. Make mistakes and learn from them, revisit your portfolio and apply your new experiences to it, this is how you naturally build a portfolio that’s unique to you, but one that remains effective.
Always keep your target user in mind, and be deliberate with the choices you make, you’ll quickly find yourself with a good portfolio that is representative of your quality of work.
These beautiful illustrations were done by my very talented friend, Daniela Valdes.
