Like many others right now you might be working on creating a new portfolio. You may realize some of the pieces you intend to show actually aren’t the best reflection of your work or you don’t have the permission to share it fully because of NDAs or your specific role on the project.

What do you do?

Create projects that showcase your abilities.

But there’s an art to choosing projects that both tell the appropriate stories you want to communicate and that you can execute quickly.

A pitch, not an archive

The biggest mistake I see in portfolios is that people treat it like an archive of their work. “Here’s some stuff I did” is the main signal it sends.

That’s a weak story. Just because you worked on it doesn’t mean it should go in your portfolio.

Instead of thinking of your portfolio like an archive, think of it as a pitch or a proposal. You want something from someone: a full-time job, a contract, etc. So, show them what’s in it for them if they hire you.

In order to do that, you have to know something about who you’re pitching. The more specific, the better. It’s good to know that you’re pitching Google on hiring you; it’s better to know that you’re pitching Angela from Google on hiring you. You might discover that Google tends to hire designers who have prior tech experience, but it’s even better to know that Angela from Google has a soft spot for hiring people who have pets.

Setting constraints

The most difficult time to decide what portfolio pieces to include is when you’re desperately looking for a job. You’re making decisions under duress, which often leads to think more about what pieces you have over what message you want to send.

Resist that urge. Take a deep breath and think about your thesis. What’s the one thing you want a hiring manager to think about you above every other candidate? Some examples to get you started:

• Subject matter expertise: “Dan knows more about design systems than every other applicant”
• Personality trait: “Dan seems more fun than every other applicant”
• Alignment: “Dan is really into basketball, just like most people on our team”

Another useful constraint to set is the number of pieces you intend to show. Some rough guidelines, depending on the signal you want to send:

• 3 projects: “I don’t have a lot of experience, but I have some. I can prioritize and be decisive. There’s more where these came from.”
• 5–9 projects: “I’m fairly senior and can add value in a lot of different places.”
• 15+ projects. “I’ve seen it all and I want you to be inundated and overwhelmed by my experience.”

The last constraint that’s useful to decide before you start making new pieces: how much time you’ll spend on one piece. Especially if you’re trying to get a job quickly, the last thing you want is to spend months on a new portfolio. How much time will you allow for each piece? If you give yourself a day per project, a senior-level portfolio will take you about a week to create. If you give yourself a week per project, a junior or mid-level portfolio will take 3 weeks to create.

(One last note about this: even though you may be in a rush, be reasonable about your portfolio as an investment. You may be looking for someone to pay you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. To think that can reasonably happen through a portfolio you slap together over a weekend is a longshot. If it was easy to spend two days on something that earns you 6-figures, everyone would be doing it. As much as it sucks to accept, spending 3 weeks on a portfolio might be a worthwhile investment to give you job security for the next few months or years.)

Sideline the “side project”

A frequent go-to for people looking to fill some portfolio slots is to dig up an obscure side project to show. That Github weekend excursion where you tried to learn Processing? Those series of “Hello World” experiments with SwiftUI? Certainly, these show that you’re open minded to learning new things, right?

Stop that. No one wants to see your unkempt sock drawer.

Every piece of work in your portfolio should be a complete thought. Side projects often aren’t, which is still valuable for you as a thought exercise, but they don’t often belong in a portfolio.

Instead of thinking of what side projects you can quickly pull off, reframe it like this: what story arcs can I share? A good story arc has exposition, rising action, a climax, falling action, and a resolution.

Project ideas

Armed with a pitch mindset and appropriate constraints, here are 7 different strategies I would use to create portfolio pieces that send a strong message that I’m the right person to hire.

1. The “Gimme Some More”: Every project in your portfolio should be a project you would love to do again. Do you love illustrating animal mascots? Have at least one portfolio piece showing how well you illustrate animal mascots. It might take a while to find a client or company that wants you to illustration animal mascots, but once you do, you’ll be in heaven.
2. The “Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Innocent”: Say you did some amazing work for Bank of America, but you can’t show any of the work because it’s under NDA. Create a duplicate of the project but change the name to RoboBank or something fictitious. Swap the main brand red for brand blue. Change the Open Sans corporate typeface to Inter instead. Disclose in your portfolio piece that all of the names and data have been anonymized so as not to be recognizable as the original project, but otherwise keep everything else the same.
3. The “I Use This Every Day”: No one cares about your unsolicited redesign of Instagram, because no one believes that you have any more insight about Instagram than anyone else. Instead, redesign something otherwise unglamorous that you use every day. For me, it’d be the terrible website for the credit union where I pay my car loan. I can never find the right contact info, my account number, and the autopay always fails so I have to manually process it anyway. I’d re-architect the navigation, remove some content, and give it a visual facelift—and it’d probably only take a few hours of work.
4. The “Pro-Bono”: A variation of the “I Use This Every Day,” if you’re gonna do an unsolicited redesign, do it for an organization that needs it, not Facebook or Netflix. For me, I’d do a redesign for the local theater company my daughters are part of. And hey, if I’m really feeling great about it, I might even offer it to the company for free if they want it.
5. The “Redux”: Got a project that you wish you could do over again? Do it over again. Did it not have the outcomes you initially wanted? Make it have the outcomes you wanted. Think about what it would have needed to change, and show what it would be like if that change had occurred. Acknowledge in the portfolio piece that you went back and did the project again after it was done. Hiring managers are suckers for that kind of stuff. I did a project for Microsoft years ago that I totally botched: I tried to do too much, and the end result was really confused. I’m dying to have another crack at it, and I know what I’d do differently: I’d pick a much more constrained idea, and I’d spend all of my time perfecting one specific part of the execution (SVG quality).
6. The “Play to Your Strengths”: I’m not the strongest visual designer, but I am really good on camera. Because of that, my portfolio would probably be more video-based than image-based. Bonus: it’d be more unique and memorable to the hiring manager because of it. Obfuscate your weaknesses in your portfolio and emphasize the things you’re really good at.
7. The “My Story, not The Story”: If I had a dollar for every portfolio that used a “The Brief, The Challenge, The Solution” format, this newsletter would be sponsored indefinitely. Stop writing case studies like you’re the agency that did this work. That’s The Story™ of the project, not Your Story™, which is much more interesting. If The Story™ is that “conversion increased by 16% year-over-year,” Your Story™ is that it was the first time you used A/B testing software and you learned that button position actually had no effect on conversion rate. It’s your portfolio; tell your story.

Why do this kinds of examples work? Because they’re real. They’re complete thoughts. They’re not abbreviated ideas. They show that you’re talented, thoughtful, resourceful, ambitious, and original—all the things hiring managers want from a direct report and individual contributors want from a teammate and colleague.

Do you have a similar idea and want some feedback about whether or not it’d be a good portfolio piece? Reply and let me know about it and I’ll give you my perspective on it.

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