Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
You don't want to give up every single step of your process in a case study. You don't want to be so big and nerdy that it's worse of a book. You want to interest the potential employer or freelance client to jump on a call with you, where on the call you'll be able to actually show who you are, what's your personality when you talk about the process. ♪
Hello everyone! How are you guys doing? Your favorite... No, no, no, this is bad, this is bad, this is bad. I'm afraid I forgot how to do this. It's really honest. Exactly, exactly. We haven't been recording it for one month, so we need to practice it a little bit more frequently. So...
Hello everyone, how are you guys doing? Welcome on the eighth episode of Honest UX Talks podcast. First of all, this is exciting because we finally got a name for our podcast. Secondly, it's super exciting to jump on a call with Joanna today just because this is the first call since we have launched our podcast. Last week we launched the podcast, now we have a name, now we have social media, and now we actually have the real, real listeners, which makes this a
call a little bit more sort of responsible for us all. On this note, I just wanted to say, hi Ioana, how are you doing? How have been your last months and how do you feel about our launch? Hello, hello everyone. Thanks for tuning in to our eighth episode. And to answer your question, Anfisa, I was a bit stressed out before launching it.
Because it felt like I was not sure what we're doing, whether this is something that people need, because there are already a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of content around UX design on Instagram, on Medium, on YouTube, everywhere. And I felt like, do we have a place in all this ecosystem, in this landscape? Is there a place for our honest UX talks?
will people be interested? I mean, I know that we both decided to do this, not necessarily for the success we're going to have and for the amazing audiences we're going to build, but for our own experiment and maybe having a bit of a more sophisticated content for our followers. But I was, yeah, I was unsure whether this will be picked up in any way. And yeah,
Surprise, surprise. It really was. Really, I got a lot of excitement from my followers, a lot of messages on several channels. People wrote to me on Facebook, other people, Instagram.
Yeah, other listeners wrote to me on LinkedIn. So it was like a very celebration-like period. Exactly. It felt literally the same for me. A little holiday, a little celebration and also intense moment when you feel like you want to respond to everybody. You want to say, thank you so much. Oh my God, we did it. Stuff like this. Yeah.
But obviously, yes, you still have to work and do your stuff and live your life. But in this, I remember I wrote you a DM that, oh my God, I can't focus on my work. It's the middle of the day. We have meetings. I can't do anything. I'm so excited.
So yeah, it was quite exciting for sure. Right now, as it has been one week, we have about 864 listeners when I look in the analytics, which sounds to me really, really cool. So just wanted to say kudos to you guys. Thank you so much for listening and supporting us. We super, super highly appreciate it.
every single one of you. Just because we have started receiving a lot of DM messages, we also have started receiving questions and open questions from you guys.
So in today's topic, in today's sort of episode, we are going to cover one question from the audience. So the topic of today's episode is how do we build UX design portfolio? I know it's a very, very common topic. A lot of people struggle with the portfolio. Me myself struggle with it. I'm going to talk about it in a sec. But yeah, today's topic is portfolios review. And here's
Here is the quick sort of intro to a DM message we have received from the listener Irma Romero. She was writing to us and asking, now I'm going through the process of making my portfolio in Notion and I have many doubts about whether it looks unprofessional. I wanted to ask you if perhaps in the next few topics you could talk about how to organize a portfolio well and especially if the new ways to send it are well received.
For example, in Figma, Notion, WordPress, or website, and so on. So yeah, let's try to cover this topic in today's episode. And I think we can start by sort of discussing the first thing. So I think the first question you should ask yourself is, when is it a good time for you to start building a portfolio? Should you start it as soon as you, you know, let's say, started transitioning to UX design? Or should you start building a portfolio when you have been
educating yourself, taking your courses, maybe boot camps, maybe building side projects on the side. So when is the right moment to start your portfolio? What do you think, Ioana? I love the question and I think it's a great opening point.
I'm not sure whether there's a clear answer to this question. What I would recommend or maybe consider to be the best way to go about it is to start working on your portfolio as soon as you're ready or as soon as you have something to say. Don't postpone too much because we all know we all were all guilty of this. I know that designers tend to postpone working on their portfolio early.
for many years, many times. And I think that it's great that you start as soon as possible, as soon as you have some ideas to put into your portfolio. But another point that I would add is that
Often portfolios are needed for you to get a job. So it's probably also correlated with when you're ready to start applying to jobs and putting yourself out there. And so, yeah, it's this, let's say, ecosystem of elements that tend to work on the moment that you should be building a portfolio.
What do you think? Yeah, yeah, I like it. I do think that portfolio should be kind of prepared to different levels of your experience, whether it is maybe finding an internship when you feel like you're not confident, you want to learn, you almost want to treat your first gig as a learning experience. Maybe a junior designer when you feel like you know how to do things, but you're still not confident and you want to learn again, but you already can bring value to the team.
and then maybe middle. So it's basically like this iterative process from internship, junior, middle, and senior. Even though when I was a freelancer for a long time, I didn't know which level I am because I've been a freelancer for about six years. So I didn't really know how to assess myself and my skills. But I'm going to talk about it in a sec. So it's basically in the moment when you start feeling like you need to level up or you need to start
from the beginning and start craving your way up to the top. Also, I do think that even though I say like, okay, you need to have something nice build up when you're about to apply for a job position or for a next client gig, you can still contribute to your portfolio by doing some sort of social media work or building your own repository of experiences and different project bits and
For me, it really, really helped. I think it was 2014 when I received a book from my internship that was called Show Your Work. It's the book written by Austin Kleon. When I was reading the book, I felt like, oh my God, I coincide with it so much because it was all about not just having something super perfect, something ready and full and complete, but really just sharing bits of everyday life. And that's how you create this
sort of completeness and transparency to what you are doing. So I feel like you, yes, you can and should have a portfolio in place already for some sort of next level, but it's also super sort of important to build up the bits of bits of bits and bits of your work on a daily life basis through maybe having a social media or having your own blog. So it's sort of like a compliment to your portfolio, but I think in the current period of time,
it's really helpful to show who you are and what you care about. Yeah. Well, since we're trying to keep this conversation as honest as possible and very personal, I would love to hear about your own story with the portfolio. I mean, when did you feel like, okay, this is the right time for me to start building a portfolio? How did everything around it happen? And then I maybe can share my side of the story.
Yes, I'm going to share my story, but it's not the story that anybody would expect to hear. So my story goes pretty simple. I don't have a portfolio in a classic way, and I have never had the portfolio in a classic way that, you know, traditionally you would expect to see. Sort of like when you receive a portfolio in a nice, beautiful link with your name in it, you open it, it's a website, it's a beautifully built website that takes you by hand and explains and tells you the story.
Somehow I've been still always able to find a job that I'm looking for, a freelance client that I'm looking for to work without having a solid or classic portfolio that you probably still need to build if you want to optimize your chances to get the client or a job. So far right now, I only have a Trello board.
I think I've built it or not even build it, but I put it together in one day just because I really needed to have something under my hand. Like in a moment when somebody asks me again,
Show me your portfolio. It was like a board, almost like a Kanban board, but presented in a way that every group of projects will be sort of labeled under a specific category. Let's say this is web project. This is UX project, research project, maybe a strategy. This is UI project. And here are startups I was doing myself, building products myself. That's where I would show the competency I have in those different fields.
And each card in these boards would have just a description and links to different stages of work. For example, Miro for secondary search, maybe EnvisionLink for low fidelity, EnvisionLink for high fidelity product, and then maybe testing results again as a link. So back in 2018, I only have this Trello board and this is where I've stopped working.
And I still feel like every day that I need to build my portfolio, like in a normal way that everybody would expect you to have. Yet somehow it always worked for me.
So in the past, I think in the beginning, it was word of the mouth. It was like offline networking. People knew me. They would recommend me and they would trust me. So somehow they didn't need to see my portfolio because maybe they knew my work that I was doing for other clients. They visited the website of my client. They said like, oh, I like this design. Who was the designer? Can you recommend me this designer? And that was sort of my portfolio. Later on, it was my social media somehow. And I was still sharing some case studies
Even in the carousel format, it was still working. And then again in 2018, it was like a moment when I just, again, I didn't have time. That's the honest truth, unfortunately. Definitely, a portfolio takes you at least one month to build to make it solid. It's like a real full project.
that you need to invest in yourself. So I never really had the luxury of one free month to actually do this. And I just found two days to put together a Trello board. That would be the only way to show my portfolio. I also have like some case studies in here and there in medium, in Figma, et cetera, et cetera. So if needed, I would send the link and I present and I jump on a call and tell everything about what I'm doing, how I'm doing and what needs to be communicated to the client so that he understands my way of working.
but in a way it was not optimized or streamlined portfolio where everything would be already tackled for the client. It would be me still trying to communicate in the least possible investment of time possible.
Ever. Yet it works, but I don't recommend doing it. That's my bottom line. I think you still should care about user experience of your portfolio if you want to target great jobs. Tell me about your portfolio. Please tell me you're not so much better than me. Before I start sharing my story, I want to say that your story is fantastic. And I think that there is a takeaway, an important takeaway. I think the point to the story is that a portfolio by itself is not enough.
that there are a lot of other elements that will help you build the way to success in applying for jobs. So it also matters that you maybe have...
I don't know if necessarily a personal brand, but if you're able to articulate and communicate your process and tell your story through other mediums, probably maybe with medium articles, it's a very good example and so on. So I think that a portfolio by itself is not enough. And sometimes it's not even necessary. I mean, I don't know, maybe Jared Spool was writing something along those lines a couple of weeks, months ago.
that, especially for design leadership, portfolios are not necessary. So people will not look at some PDF presentation of the work you've done. Instead, they will look at the places you worked with, the clients you had, the projects that came out. They will look at the final product. They will look at the actual outcomes that are out there. So it's not...
mandatory that you have a portfolio but for many jobs and especially in the early days of your career before you are able to establish a name for yourself it's important that you have a portfolio and getting back to my story I created my portfolio because I was forced by Toptal when applying on their platform so I heard that Toptal at that moment was kind of all the rage in terms of a
freelancing opportunities and it was a very well curated job board and everybody wanted to be on top talent and I said okay I need to do this I need to be on top talent because they were very proud that they had only 3% of top talent worldwide I mean it was maybe more of a ego
because I already had a full-time job and I was not necessarily looking for more work. But yeah, I wanted to apply for TopTal and they had a clear requirement for a PDF portfolio. If I recall correctly, it was like their condition. That was on their term. They had to make a PDF portfolio. So I know that recently I was talking to a design recruiter and when I asked him...
it was an Instagram live that I did on you at scooties. And I asked him about the format of the portfolio. And he says, Oh, you need a website. If you're a designer, then you need to have a website. You can send me a PDF or a PowerPoint. But then I was like, come on, it's about the process. It's not. So it's kind of an open conversation. I don't have a strong opinion around it. I don't think that PDFs are necessarily wrong. I think that you can convey a very nice story and you can, you can, you can,
put a great structure into it. And it's not that faux pas, if you want. Don't do the mistake of creating a PDF portfolio. But at the same time, I think we're right now moving into our next part of the conversation. That is the format in which your portfolio should be.
So continuing on this line about the format, I think that PDFs are not horrible. They're not that bad. I think they got a bad name, but I think my PDFs did a perfect job so far. And oftentimes when I was in the process of interviewing, I used another more
light version of the portfolio pdf still pdf version of uh the portfolio in which i i kind of walk through uh my experience so the case studies one by one but yeah i think that uh probably a website is what's mostly accepted in the industry right now but i think what's interesting and this takes us back to the question that irma if i recall correctly asked us
I think that things are starting to change and that there are new channels and mediums in which people are sharing their portfolios. I know that it's a practice, emerging practice that you share your portfolio in Notion or just like you are the perfect example with your Trello board, which is also another alternative way of sharing your design experience. So I don't think there's a winning format. I think the information that's in it
and the way you share your experience and your experience in itself is what's essential. What are your thoughts on the format that a portfolio should be in 2021? Yeah, I think I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, honestly. I hope I will try to be brief here, but I can't promise, just in advance. So in my experience, and that's also coming from experience, not just applying, but also receiving different portfolios,
I think like if there is like a gradation of best portfolio, worst portfolio, still PDF would be on the low end. Like it would be one of the worst experiences to receive it.
So I wouldn't say that, yeah, you can still communicate your process through the PDF. And I wouldn't say that don't do this. If that's the only way you can do this because you don't have so much time, it's still worth it. And also, I think it's, again, it just does the job, right? It explains your thinking process. So if that's the only way for you to do this, you should still do this. However, I do think like from the receiving end, when you receive, let's say in one day, I don't know, 50 applications and 10 of them sends you a portfolio in the PDF,
there are lower chances that your portfolio will be sort of standing out or highlighted in front of the rest of the portfolios. Just because, again, it's just coming from my experience, but recently I was searching for a social media designer to help me with social media. And again, it was like, it was a lot of applications, more than 50 emails. And every time I would receive the PDF, it was a bulky experience for me to even open it.
Especially if you just send me a CV. I don't understand what kind of designer you are if you're sending me a CV. I don't see who you are. I don't see your work.
The worst would be probably CV, but then the PDF, just because when you open an email with the PDF, you always feel like, oh my God, I need to come to the web because most probably, and usually that's worked like that. You have to open it in the landscape format. You have to, you know, go to your computer and really read it thoughtfully because there are a lot of details there in one slide, let's say, or one page.
So in a nutshell, like when you open, let's say you have 50 emails and sometimes you're just, you know, you're on the go, you're in a ride or something. You open that link.
And it demands you to download it maybe sometimes, especially if it's a Google disk. So you have to go to your computer, download it, open at full resolution and read. And it's a lot of content in one slide. But again, I do still think that you can communicate your process. And if the receiving end would be making time to go through your portfolio,
you can still communicate what are your values as a designer. Also, just to support the PDF portfolio is another fact, is that still, if you are HR or a designer manager who don't want to miss out on the opportunities to hire a great designer just because they didn't have time to create a portfolio, then it's a good company probably that has the time to go through your portfolio.
And then probably they would not really care if it's a PDF or it's whatever other format. But in some companies, especially if you're targeting very well-branded, big company, big design agency, PDF portfolio could be not a very optimal way to present yourself. So again, on the lower end, it would be for me, CV or PDF. Then in the middle, it would be those
tools like Notion and Figma, which I still feel like are better a little bit than PDF, just because you can also have, first of all, it's responsive. So you can open it either on mobile phone or web desktop, and you can have interlinks. So you can have pages linked with each other. Let's say it's all my case studies. Then you go inside and you read the whole case, and then it's easy to come back and navigate through the whole portfolio and understand who you are.
And yes, it's not super nice. It's not super fancy. It doesn't have all those animations and branding elements. However, it does the job. And again, maybe if you are a very busy designer, that is okay. Maybe again, if the company cares about who they're hiring, they care more about the person they're hiring rather than, you know, a person who can sort of
fascinate with the portfolio, then it's all right. Look at me. I was hired at a big company, it's called Citrix, with the Trello portfolio, and it was not a point. And I told them that, look, I didn't have time. I'm sorry. It's not a good experience. I know that. But I want to take you through my case studies and tell you who I am as a person and what's my thinking process. So it still worked. They understood who am I and how I'm working. And the most important message was communicated.
this is my process, this is my level of design sort of experience. If that works, it works. If it doesn't, that's okay. I also applied to different companies in Prague and in, I think it was,
It was, I guess, April when I was applying in different companies and one company rejected me because they didn't like my portfolio, but Citrix didn't care. They looked at the portfolio in a very high level, but they wanted to jump on a call with me to discuss my cases. So Trello still worked. It's not the best experience, but who cares? They want to find the best person, not just the best portfolio. That's the thing. I loved your point where you said that the
They're not hiring a portfolio. They're trying to hire the best person. So in the end, it's not that much about the format. Just to conclude on this part of our podcast, the format is not as essential, but indeed a website might seem more professional, might seem like,
created by a designer which in the end you're supposed to design experiences so your own way of presenting yourself and telling your story is another experience that you're creating so this might be something that recruiters choose to take into account as well as they might understand that okay this is a very busy person this is someone who has been doing a lot of work they didn't invest time in polishing their portfolio so that's also fine but yeah bottom line is that um
it won't hurt to have a good portfolio. It will never hurt. Never. For sure. I agree. Yeah. I also wanted to hear your opinion about what do you think should be inside of a portfolio? What should be those must have things, um,
if you can even think about checklist in any portfolio, especially if you're, you know, if you ever had experience to look for designers, what were your top things to look for in any portfolio? It's a great question. And I think it's the one that concerns us most. So, okay. I'm planning to build a portfolio in whatever format I choose, but now what, how do I start? How do I end? What do I have to emphasize in my portfolio? What should I share? Yeah.
I think that there's, of course, not an ultimate answer to this question. There's no right, absolutely right answer. What I always say is that you kind of have a high level structure that's quite common. But of course, you don't need to abide by it religiously and do the same format. Everyone should have the same format. I think that...
you should also bring your personality to the table when you construct your portfolio and this will also maybe have an impact on the structure you choose and so on. But just to give a high level universal structure, if you want, I think that you should start with
So now I'm talking about case studies when you build your, because of course you can share other things in your portfolio, like your experience with building a personal brand, maybe some other projects, side projects, like, I don't know, creating a podcast or building a design community or organizing design meetups, anything of that sort. But now I'm just referring to case studies. I think the universal-ish structure that you might go about would be starting with an introduction of the project
the setup in which you worked on that project, maybe if it was a client, a freelancing project, if you were on a job, if you were the only designer in the team, if you were a team of several designers, other roles that you worked on. And so just to set the scene, if you want, for the project, this is how you should start a case study. Then you should move into...
the problem that you were trying to solve. So why are we doing this? What we were trying to understand and address and talk a little about the design challenge if you want. So this was the challenge. Uh, I'm making a small break here. I just want to emphasize the fact that you mentioned that, uh, hiring managers and recruiters don't usually have much time and they get maybe 50 hundreds of applications. And so you really need to be, uh,
of their time and not go into too much detail. So I think that portfolios should kind of stick to the essence of the process and not tell the story of everything you did every day in a particular project. So don't write too much text. That's really important because nobody will have the time to properly understand everything you write there. So stick to the essence. So the essence of the design challenge
and then maybe move a little into your process. But don't, I think this is an advice that I'm giving, especially to junior designers, because sometimes I see that they feel they need to have the process like they read about it in textbooks. So it has to be that now I'm doing the interviews and then the persona and then the customer journey and all these elements have to be there. There's no way I don't have a persona. Sometimes personas are not needed or the customer journey doesn't,
is not needed in a particular project. It may be that, I don't know, some elements are relevant, some other elements of the design process are not relevant and you need to adjust your process to the problem you're solving. So the process could mean your
Thinking process just your thinking process so it doesn't have to be ticking the boxes of I did the wireframes and then I did this and then handoff and then because this is universal and I don't want to see something that's on the internet in any article about how the process should look like.
And then, of course, what's really important, and I think that this is the point that matters most to recruiters, is talking about the outcome, the solution that you came about, how you decided on that particular solution, what you did to validate it. And so I think that this is what actually concerns a manager. So what was the outcome of everything you did and how did it work? How did it perform? It's great if you can add some metrics to
some UX metrics and it's great if you are able to show that you didn't just finish the project and then moved on with your life but you were also very involved afterwards and making sure that it's performing right in adjusting iterating continuously even after you launched your solution this is this is another important point and of course I think that from a storytelling perspective from from this point that's important of showing your personality showing who you are I think that
Case studies give a great opportunity at the end in terms of lessons that you've learned, takeaways, things that you wish you would have done differently.
what went wrong, what you've learned and so on. And I think that now I've talked a lot and I want to give the mic on to you. Yeah, of course. No, yeah, this is cool. I think you've covered really well the case studies. By the way, if you guys have questions about specifics of case studies, maybe you have a specific situation, please DM us on our new Instagram, honestuxtalks.
and um leave your message there we'll try to tackle it on the next episodes but uh coming back to the topic of today so portfolio case studies communicating your process um i do agree with you that case studies most common mistake i see right now in the case studies is when you're sort of doing it uh
using the checklist. Like you obviously took probably one design course and then you followed it blindly without sort of filtering the methods that you need to use that shows the very much juniority of your experience. So, yeah,
I would recommend you to maybe have a senior designer to check your portfolio or maybe someone who can help you have more experience than you to show and tell you if the case study really makes sense. Because I do sometimes also see those case studies that are almost like massively produced cases
from, I don't know, courses or bootcamps that tell you the process and you literally just copy it one by one. But sometimes it's not necessarily need to be exactly one by one process when you do step one, step two, step three, step four. I'm not talking about stages, just for a disclaimer. I'm talking about steps like I need to do this particular survey, this particular interview, this particular persona, this particular template of user journey, and this particular course.
other steps, whatever. So I do think that you need to be a little bit more critically thinking when you're creating case studies. What are the most critical components of
for you to tell the story of that case study. Sometimes it's not about persona. Sometimes it's all about understanding the typical mistakes, usability issues. Maybe you did a heuristic evaluation and you realized that here are the top 10 mistakes that we were doing. And yes, I know some of the basic information about our target user, but right now we're solving the
problem of the usability. So knowing in details the persona and let's say their motivations and fears, it's not the most important information, not the most critical information for these case studies. So you need to critically ask yourselves, what are the most important and relevant aspects of
or information bits or even puzzles that make up the story that really tell the viewer the value that I'm trying to find here and the problem that I'm trying to solve here. So yeah, don't just copy paste any case study. It's important to have a structure in mind and the process in mind, but you don't need to be like this super nice student who checked marked every single step.
Design processes we discussed in one of the episodes is messy and not always we can make sure that the process is perfect and we follow every single step like it's a workbook. Another point which I wanted to add for your case study story is that, so it's right that you need to think, oh, how much time it takes to go through my case studies. You still need to make sure that you give the context. You need to say what was your process, what was the problem and what was the resolution. Those are important aspects of any storytelling.
But you don't need to give every single bit in your case studies. I do like Medium just because it shows me how much time it takes to read my case studies. But an important note here is that try to keep something for the conversation. You don't want to give up every single step of your process in a case study. You don't want to be so big in the idea that it's a worse of a book.
You want to interest the potential employer or freelance client to jump on a call with you, where on the call you'll be able to actually show who you are, what's your personality when you talk about the process. This way you A, give much more context, give much more details, B, show who you are, how you talk and how it is.
How does it feel to work with you? And see you also show your passion to the design, to the process. So you want to keep a dessert for the interview. So maybe that could help you a little bit to sort of minimize the amount of details you leave in the portfolio. And in general, when we talk about portfolio, yes, I would say 80% of your portfolio is the case studies. In general, I would suggest to follow or have about...
Maybe from four to six case studies, not more, because if it's less, it feels like, oh, maybe you don't have an experience. But if it's more than six, it's very hard to choose and you create this overwhelm of choice. So you want to sort of shoot only for the best case studies that you have, only the most representative case studies, maybe in a specific industry or the most sort of outstanding results for the clients. So show not too much, but show only the best works. So you want to shoot only for the best case studies that you have,
still any client, even if you have 10 projects, 15 projects, 20 projects, trust me, no client will check all the 20 projects. Most likely the clients will check only one, two projects and it's better be the best projects you have. So you want to show the best projects basically in your client, for your clients and the portfolio. But
other aspects other than portfolio cases, you can also talk a little bit about who you are as the personality, especially if you don't run your social media proactively. You want to tell who you are, what you do, your hobbies, a little bit like context, where you live, what you do, what you do in your free time. Do you have family? Maybe just talk a little bit
more about yourself. Even small things like, yeah, I have a dog, I love calligraphy, I read these kind of books, whatever. I also recommend to add your personal photos. Of course, they need to be not a matter of photos that you do with your low-resolution photo camera, but
good photos to show what kind of person you are. Like maybe smiley, maybe in the context, maybe in the working environment, but still show your photos because that really helps to build the first impression about you as the person. So telling about yourself, I think is super important. If you have said project, it's not a bad thing. I think you should totally include them. I think said projects helps to understand the
your personality, your passions much more. And I think that the good clients, if you target the good clients, of course, are attracted by people who don't only do work 24-7. They also want to see personalities. So showing a little bit who you are behind the scenes. If you have social media, plug them in. That's a really, really good thing because people can see and get to know you on a more deeper personal level.
And of course, case studies. Those would be three main important things. What you do, what industry you do, what kind of case studies you have, what expertise you have, case studies that proves this expertise and impact on the businesses. And then you yourself, how does it feel to work with you? Those would be the most important aspects or parts of the portfolio, I think, for any creative, even if you are in the very beginning. What do you think, Ioana, also?
So is there something you would add or is there something you're looking for in portfolios as well? It's funny that I tend to agree with everything you say. And I don't know if we ended up doing this together because we really think alike and we're in this echo chamber where we are in a perpetual confirmation bias. Yeah.
Oops. But I agree with everything you said. And I also wanted to, before we move into our conclusion points or the ideas that we like most, I would like to ask you a final question.
You mentioned that it's optimal to include four, but no more than six projects. I think from my perspective, four is a great number. But my question for you is, what should junior designers do if they don't have four projects? But if I have one or...
maybe sometimes, okay, two, but what if I have just one project? How do I build a portfolio around that? Yeah, well, it's a good question. I think it was even maybe worse the whole episode later on. However, it's true that sometimes if you're transitioning to design and you don't really have all those super amazing cases and you don't have a huge variety of cases to select from, then it's really like a hard sort of place for you to,
to communicate who you are. But I still recommend everybody to be proactive and to build your portfolio in the moment when you feel like you are ready to apply for this first, let's say, junior design job. That's why I feel like, okay, try to do at least four case studies
so that you know you have some sort of confidence to build and to bring value to this new company you will be working with. And these cases don't necessarily need to be coming from the client. They don't need to be working for top-level, top-tier brands in the world.
You can even, you know, start simple, start small. A, solve your problem. If you have a problem on a daily life basis, observe your life and see if there's any place or sort of environment that you would like to improve.
that would show that you're an attentive person that is important in the design industry. B, you can ask friends of friends of friends, your parents, your friends of parents, et cetera, to see if somebody have maybe a small local business, a business opportunity
in general and wants to or maybe they have an offline business and they don't have any online businesses um especially in the area we live right now especially in 2020 it was very important to be online otherwise your business would probably be in a very hard place so
So, yes, I think that you can still find a job, even if it's a free project in the beginning. You don't necessarily have to start making money if you're not sure that you will really solve the problem and help someone to improve their online performance. But you can find people who need businesses, who need to be online, that need to build websites or projects or solutions online. It doesn't really matter what it is.
C, you can go to the hackathons as we discussed already a few times in our previous podcast. So yes, you can go just to hackathon and with the team, you can build a pretty decent case, especially if it is a service design gem.
which doesn't really focus only on like building a tangible and working prototype, but focuses really on a design process from the moment you understand the problem to the moment you build a solution. It's all about design thinking and all about design process, which can be really a good thing for your portfolio.
I was in a service design jam just in August in 2020, so half a year ago, and it was super mind-blowing how much we were able to do of a design process in just a weekend, in 48 hours. Yes, we were sleeping just a few hours a day, but in, let's say, 48 hours, it almost felt like two weeks of work. That could totally make a very good design case, especially if you're working in a team of four or five people. So, yeah.
Those type of places, finding your problem, finding people who need a design, being proactive and participating in events could be a great place to start for you to build a few case studies that would build your portfolio and communicate your process and your thinking. Yeah, thinking process, basically, as a designer. Any other places you would add here? I would also...
list the idea of volunteering with a senior designer so maybe offering to just shadow a senior designer and help them with some smaller parts and do you need help on that freelancing projects i can do the messier parts i don't know and uh and uh by this way learn so try to offer your um
I know that there's a controversy in the industry in regards to working for free. I'm not advocating working for free, but it may be that in the beginning you might need to do voluntary work and it's something that will benefit you most. So should we jump into our conclusion part? Yes, let's conclude on today's episode. I will go first. Please.
The points that made most sense to me were like sort of mini aha moments. I'm not going to talk about my own ideas because I don't think it's elegant. So I had this brilliant idea. Let me just remind you of the brilliant idea that I shared. So I loved most some points that you made.
I love the point regarding the idea that you're hiring a person, not the portfolio. So this is something that has a lot of power to it because I think it's the quintessential takeaway that I would like any listener to embrace and take home with them. I think that it's really important that you focus not that much on
the portfolio and case studies and the perfect structure and the perfect format and everything, but you focus more on showcasing your personality, on showing yourself, on showing who you are as a person, maybe including some slides, just like you said about what makes you happy, what do you enjoy, what type of books you read, what kind of music you listen to and whatever. This was one point. Another one was the idea around teasing with your portfolio. This is what I
away from what you said. So not necessarily
giving out everything when you build your portfolio and giving all the details and making a very clear, perfect illustration of what happened, but maybe think about it as teasing your recruiter into wanting to have a conversation with you. So just giving him a flavor, not a very superficial flavor, a good flavor, a deeper flavor of, uh, of, uh,
what you've done on that project and then inviting them, making it enough, inviting enough so that you can actually have a call. And that's where you have higher chances of showing who you are and what you actually know and how senior you are and so on. And the last point is, yeah, it kind of,
encompasses everything that I already went through is the idea of talking about yourself and showing photos of yourself showing who you are I cannot emphasize this enough because I think that when you see a very bland portfolio with just I don't know screenshots and UI design and
some text. You have absolutely no idea. So I think that you should give a sense of who you are and you should show it as much as possible. I agree with you. I think that's true. It's not just case studies. You're not a robot. You're a human who will be working with somebody.
Another point I would definitely add here, and I think it was sort of told between the lines, but I just want to emphasize this, that ultimately it doesn't really matter in which format you're doing it, but it's a place where you create the trust. It's a place where you sort of break the ice and trying to initiate the conversation with you. That's the first filter that helps the recruiter to understand if it's worth spending a time to talking with you or not.
So it's all ultimately building the trust, either with your case studies that, just like you said, tease to invite to the conversation, or with just understanding who you are. As I said, I didn't have a proper portfolio. My Instagram was my portfolio, and that was enough to create the trust. Portfolio is not a perfect workbook, checklist, or say, website with this amount of things in it. It's really...
a place where a recruiter or a design manager gets to understand, would I trust this person? Who is this person? What are they doing? What are they interested in? Do I want to talk to them? If yes, if your portfolio looks credible, solid, if your cases sound reasonable and you look an interesting person, I would invite you for the conversation and want to hear what was your process? What did you do? Can you tell me more about it?
And trust me, that will be definitely one of the questions. Can you talk about your case studies in any interviews? All the interviews I did, it was all about, can you tell me a little bit more about your process? You will still talk about it. No portfolio will talk about
It will be you starting the conversation and then taking it farther and discussing much more in depth because this is how you really show who you are and how you work. Another thing is format is just, format is not super-pooper important, but the bad format of it, let's say not very user-friendly format of it, can decrease your chances of being seen or heard or invited to the next level. Just because we need to understand that some brands, especially if you're applying for a very...
big and famous brands don't have so much time and they need to filter and really look for the best, best, best, best, best. So if you want to be maybe best, best, best, best, best. Okay, yes, in this case, you need to spend your time, whatever it is, one month, two months, six months, one year to build a super nice portfolio. And also what last sort of cherry on the top of our episode for today would be that I feel like
when you show your case studies, the story is important, but what is super, super important if you want to level up your portfolio also is to show the impact of your design on the business. Yes, I know it's not applicable for junior designers and not always even to medium designers, but if you are a little bit higher or you want to sort of level up your portfolio, I think you should start including numbers and the impact on the business with your case studies.
because yes, level one is to show that you can build products. Level two maybe is that you can show that you know what you're doing, you're confident and you can make decisions smart. But level three is for sure to show that you can bring
you know you're going to improve businesses you can really impact the businesses you're a very worthy sort of designer not just like a making things beautiful basically so impactful case studies is something you can strive for if you're still not at that level that's all right again you need to understand at which level you are but um after some time try to include a
maybe ROI, return on investment and stuff like this that could help you sort of to look really more serious designer or more next level, top level designer. That is it from my side. Actually, there are many more tips. I think that portfolio and the case studies is a big, big topic.
So we might leave some tips. We can consider about top five, I don't know, tips or top five mistakes, et cetera, in the next episodes. But as I said, if you have more questions or requests, just DM us on our Instagram. We will do our best to reply to your request in the next episodes.
that's it for today thank you so much everybody for listening hope to see you on the next episode don't forget to rate our podcast so other people can also find our podcast later on and thank you again bye-bye thank you everyone bye