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- [00:00]
Host
I've interviewed a lot of designers who have landed some pretty high profile roles, and I'm starting to notice some trends. So this video breaks down six portfolio tips that you can use to stand out. And we're going to kick things off with longtime design leader Chris Abbott.
- [00:16]
Chris Abbott
If I think about everyone on my team, even if they're all in the same role, even if they're all product designers, it's very common for me to have like a one liner around, like where that person fits on that team. That's the person who's really technical, that's the person who's really good at research, that's the person who's really strategic, that's the person who can align the stakeholders. You kind of have this thing about everyone.
- [00:36]
Host
I've asked a lot of hiring managers what they're looking for in candidates, and oftentimes the answer is that they're looking for specific gaps to fill. And this idea of a one liner, yeah, maybe it might feel limiting, but the reality is that it's the best way to help that hiring manager understand how you could fit inside of the team. So tactic number one is to think about what you want your one liner to be and then reinforce that in every touch point.
- [01:01]
Chris Abbott
If I'm hiring for a role, I'm trying to fill that kind of slot. And so what's your one liner? I can look at all your work and you can either design that in, you can decide what you want your one liner to be and then try to reverse engineer that, or you can just show me everything and leave it up to me to decide. It might be the thing that you're really good at, or it might be the thing that you're. Does not make you exceptional, but you just happen to include and sort of muddy the water, especially right now with the market being so competitive. If you can decide what is that thing that makes me different than the hundred other people that just applied to this role, and then design that into your story, and then bake that story into your portfolio, bake it into your resume to some extent, bake it into your portfolio presentation. If you do your first screen with a recruiter and they say, tell me about yourself, like, have that in mind, like what, what is my brand as a designer? And, and how do I, like, structure my story around that.
- [01:52]
Host
Tactic number two is to ditch the traditional portfolio grid. You know the one I'm talking grid of cards, one for each company that you've worked at. But there's a few problems with this. First is you make project level stories the first class citizen. But what would it look like for your own personal narrative and all of your best work to be the star of the website? I think more designers could benefit from thinking of portfolio projects as more of an appendix to the homepage rather than the primary user journey. But there's another problem too. The traditional portfolio structure forces you to boil an entire project's worth of compelling work into a single thumbnail. That means the majority of hiring managers only see that one image because, let's face it, a very small percentage of people actually read your case studies. And that's why I love what Marco Cornacci did. He created multiple entry points to the same case study as a way to showcase all of his best UI directly on the homepage.
- [02:48]
Marco Cornacci
I remember at the time, again, this is like my first design job that I was leaving and I felt like I had very limited design work. Even though I was like the solo designer at the startup, it wasn't necessarily a success or something that people knew of. And I just remember feeling this like, overwhelming sense of like, oh man, like, I don't know if I have enough work to get that next job that I want. What can I do to like, really bring this life to work and like, put it in people's faces as soon as they visit the site where they don't have to like, dive through project pages? You know, I still wanted to have those things on the website, but I really wanted to make a good first impression of, like, you on the site. You can see the work immediately, you can interact with it, and if you.
- [03:25]
Host
Don'T know Marco, this tactic worked. His portfolio at Marco, FYI, landed him a job as the founding designer at Diagram, which then led him to Figma, and now he's at Vercel. But back then he didn't have a bunch of work to show. I mean, if Marco would have used the standard template, he'd only have four thumbnails on his homepage. Instead, he turned his four projects into eight separate cards that perfectly showcase his skills. Which leads me to tactic number three. When you're presenting your work and telling your story, make sure you show, don't tell. Let's hear from Amar Areshi, who I interviewed when he was the head of Design at 11 Labs and now he's leading design at Google DeepMind.
- [04:04]
Amar Areshi
I love people who just show and don't tell. You know, I think we've gotten used to portfolio reviews and interview processes where we encourage the, the dramatic storytelling that hides the substance. Like, I do not Want to see a wall of sticky notes again and that you study and then you study three Personas. Like, I get it, that's the job. Like, you know that's the job, right?
- [04:27]
Host
In the sea of cookie cutter portfolios, if you're leading with a wall of stickies, you're going to get ruled out pretty quickly. So the question then is, what does Amar want to see?
- [04:36]
Amar Areshi
Maybe there was a cross functional gap between teams and you helped patch that through because that's the real shit that's going on in a company on a day to day basis, right? Like you help two teams see and understand where the platform maybe should have come together or where they needed to make a compromise.
- [04:50]
Host
But what if you don't have cross functional platform level work? Well, that leads me to tactic number Go extremely deep on one part of your project because this is where you can demonstrate your ability to think through complexity. So let's hear from Ashman Gagari about what he looks for when hiring at Palantir.
- [05:08]
Ashman Gagari
We don't need the 55th histogram design. Like, we are good. I think what we need is somebody to be able to talk about the data that led to those charts. And what happens if I filter that chart or if it happens to be a billion rows instead of 100 rows? Or like, how does your table work? Can I group by? Can I sort? So like, basically, if there isn't that much to work with, I'll go deep and I'll ask like highly specific questions about state machines to understand if they've really thought about the details. Because often I'll just see like a tab with the table and let's say, let's just use Ramp as an example. Beautiful app, has lots of tables, nice ones. And I think like, simply speaking, it's a table. Cool. Doesn't look like much, but there's a lot of nuance in there. You know, there's like certain things they allow, certain things they don't. Some types of sorting and filtering are good, some are not. That's opinion. And I think that type of opinion being built into just a generic table is actually enough to talk about for half an hour or whatever the interview length is and gives me enough signal on whether you are like thinking thoroughly about the system and be interrogating the actual data and the structure of the information that's being presented. And it's not just like a UI exercise of like cells and columns and rows.
- [06:21]
Host
We asked these same questions during the portfolio presentations when hiring designers at Maven because one of the Main things we wanted to see is can the designer get ultra specific and communicate the set of micro decisions that went into a small chunk of the product. And when the discussion exists at that level, it doesn't really matter what the type of product is.
- [06:41]
Ashman Gagari
Let's say the designer doesn't even have a desktop app in their portfolio. That's fine too. You can kind of derive second order complexity questions out of anything. Like even the weather app, if you just keep scrolling. There's so much more in there. There are 50 ways to show feels like there are so many ways to visualize highs and lows. There's like a visual design angle, there's a typography angle, there is the systems angle of which information do I show where there is the usability angle of what you said of do I even care about feels like and wind direction. What if my weather app was just wear a sweater today. Like that's all it said. Like no temperature, no color, nothing. All it says is just a picture of the outfit I should wear. Like that's a weather app and that's a conversation I'm willing to have for half an hour.
- [07:24]
Host
So how do you communicate all this? Well, obviously that's going to be something that you're going to have to figure out for yourself. But I will say one thing. There's alpha in video and that's what portfolio tactic number five is all about. So let's start by hearing from the founding designer at Linear, Adrian Griveau.
- [07:42]
Adrian Griveau
The thing I'm, I'm learning or trying to learn a lot at the moment. It's totally unused in the design world. Now the video part of like. So when I present the design internally, sometimes I will do a loom video, like a slight becoming video. Trying to kind of put more emphasis about my work. But I think this can be improved a lot. And when you see companies like Apple spending millions of dollars doing video to just show you the UI elements, you can think that as a designer, if you are able to produce those video by yourself, I think it's a very good asset in the future to actually express your ideas. That's something I'm really leaning on myself, working more on like the video editing part, maybe learning the basic of that and to actually explain better my work.
- [08:28]
Host
So here's a good example of what I think video could look like. This is Patrick Morgan's portfolio. He has projects on the homepage and nice little video hover state. And then for each portfolio project, the video is the embed at the top. Like this is the show of the page. And I think there's a lot of benefits to this. On one hand, it's unique, so it's an easy way to stand out. But most importantly, it demonstrates your ability to get people excited about ideas, which is a huge part of what it looks like to be successful as a designer. And this is an idea that Adrian hits on too.
- [09:04]
Adrian Griveau
I think that's also the role of your design job, to make stuff exciting. Video is a great tool. You can put a voiceover, you can add some music, you can edit it in a way that is fast. It's sometimes way better than like sending a 25 page PDF with a lot of text. You know nobody's going to read it. Actually, if you're able to make a good video about yourself, that means that's the first step of like showing that you know how to get people excited about stuff. So that's one of the goal of a designer too.
- [09:30]
Host
Now, none of this matters without tactic number six, which is to sell craft as the first impression. And I want to start by sharing this clip from Christophe Tosier, who's the head of design at Plaid.
- [09:41]
Christophe Tosier
There was a time, maybe in the 2015-2020 era, where I valued maybe more the ability to think system level, to really understand the full ecosystem of a company and set of products, and having really rigorous product thinking and problem solving, because I thought that was the hardest part to really get right. But I've also seen over the last few years that craft, if you really want to get to the finals level, is really hard to train and you really have to focus on that all the way at the beginning when you're hiring people. And so I really leveled up the bar, my own bar, for like what I'm looking for with candidates.
- [10:21]
Host
Kristof only hires people who would enter in the top half of Kraft at Plaid.
- [10:26]
Christophe Tosier
I always ask the question to the team when we're debriefing a candidate before we hire them. I always ask like, is this person going to level up the bar for us? Are they better than, you know, our average work and will they help us kind of lift it up? If not, we probably shouldn't hire this person.
- [10:42]
Host
Real quick message and then we can jump back into it if you're tired of reaching for inter or guys over and over again. I have some good news. The font picker in Framer just got a big time boost with a curated collection of open source fonts. Dozens of new display and text fonts ranging from rounded to monospace serif sans Serifs and Framer even partnered with Collectivo to offer their entire collection for their foundry. It's just another reason why I'm completely obsessed with Framer and constantly recommending it to people for their next website. You can learn more@dive.club, slash framer. I've been designing for a long time, but somehow I only signed up for Mobin this year. And honestly, I can't believe that it's taken me this long. Like, it's literally a cheat code. Being able to find inspiration for basically any pattern, any product, any flow. It's fast, it's beautiful. And I already cannot imagine designing without Maubin. It's the first place that I look at for inspiration and I can't recommend it enough. So head to Dive Club Mobin to get started today. That's M O B I N. Okay, now onto the episode. Take this portfolio from Wandi Zoo as an example. It's really simple, but right away I know she understands typography, layout, color, and that's the table stakes that I'm looking for in those first eight seconds on a website. And she very quickly checked that box for me, where I'm like, okay, now I'll look at your work. That's all for this episode. And I will see you on Friday when we talk to Jack Brody, who was one of the original designers and longtime head of product at Snap. We're going to talk about his new role at Suno and the future of music. So I will see you then.