Are you a design student preparing for a "portfolio review"? A school event, or part of a job interview process? Great! This is for you.
I've been a "reviewer" in probably 200+ portfolio reviews since I graduated, and these are the things I've noticed help students get the most out of their portfolio review time — whether it's 10 minutes or an hour.
General Advice
Don't launch into your work without talking about basic info. What are you studying, what year are you in, what kind of work are you interested in? Are you looking for internships, or jobs, or do you just want feedback on your work?
It also never hurts to be funny, or to share a memorable detail about yourself. Teams are hiring people they want to work with.
Screensharing or showing your website isn't the ideal way to show your work.
For one thing, most of the imagery isn't full-screen, meaning I'll have to squint to make out basic details.
For another, there's probably a lot of stuff on your website that you haven't thought about in a while, and you'll end up skipping around and scrolling to find the artifacts you want to show. All that movement is distracting!
Similarly, don't just pan around a Figma file — though of course you can present a "deck" made from a Figma prototype, or jump into the Figma file if your interviewer asks for it.
The easiest way to show your work in conversation is to make a presentation (google slides, keynote, pitch, whatever) that lets you walk through projects one step at a time.
For each talking point, make sure there's a singular focus. Make sure whatever you're showing is as big on-screen as possible.
If you're showing interactive work, don't show 6 screens next to each other to represent a flow — show one at a time, or an animation that walks through the flow. Even professional designers, who look at hundreds of mockups a day, often find it hard to look at mockups next to each other and quickly understand what's going on.
Related — do not show mockups of digital projects in isometric phone mockups. It's hard to tell what the details of the actual designs are. Do you use your phone while holding it at a 45° angle? No? So why are your app designs at that angle?
Don't put writing in your presentation to explain everything. Most of the explanation should come from conversation. I shouldn't have to decide whether to read what's on screen or listen to your voice. Look at how Apple announces their products — they show a picture on screen, and then talk over it.
Was it a school assignment, or freelance, or personal work? Was it group work? How long did you have to work on it? How did you decide how to approach it? What other constraints were there?
Were you just trying to make something look cool? Were you trying to satisfy requirements of the assignment? Did you test your designs with people? It's hard to tell how effective your work is if you don't communicate what your goals were.
I want to know how you decided between multiple possible approaches. Did you show it to people to see how they reacted? Did you iterate repeatedly until you found something that felt right?
There are a variety of "process documents" people show for some reason. They're usually so detailed that it's actually impossible to evaluate their validity or usefulness unless you want us to spend 5 minutes reading them.
- Don't show complicated research documents that would take a few minutes to really digest.
- Don't show complicated user flow charts.
- Related, don't show "personas" — I don't care that you made up an imaginary friend who you think would like your service.
Just tell me in clear terms what you learned from your research and how that impacted your design decisions, like "I went with this option because 80% of people I tested with found it easier to read."
Attention spans are short. Don't bore your interviewers. You don't want to sit there awkwardly when you realize that cool documentation video you made is 20 times longer than it needs to be. If Buzzfeed can make recipe videos less than a minute long, so can you.
This creates a moment for you and the reviewer to discuss the work and ask questions, without flipping back through a bunch of slides.
Be prepared for questions and to deviate from your practiced presentation. Interviewers may ask questions in the middle of your presentation rather than at the end. In fact, questions in the middle can be a good sign—it means your interviewers are paying attention.
If it's an in-person interview, try to read body language and adjust your communication accordingly. Don't be afraid to jump around, skip sections, or adjust the amount of time you spend on each section depending on where the conversation goes.
After each portfolio review, take note of what your interviewers asked about. You may need to adjust or clarify your presentation for future audiences.
You're probably used to showing your work to your peers and instructors who are familiar with the context, projects, and requirements.
Most portfolio reviewers have none of that context, and their evaluation criteria might be different than your school's.
Try explaining your work to someone outside your school—even better, someone who's outside your field. If you can explain your design projects to your teen siblings in a way they can understand, you can explain them to anyone.
Standout traits
The above are general advice that can help anyone get the most out of their review. The following are what I consider standout traits:
We look for people who can join and immediately execute at a professional level. Demonstrate strong craft in your medium — excellent typography, clear writing, performant code, etc. 3 projects executed excellently are better than 10 executed pretty well.
Demonstrate your ability to do more than just execute assignments or briefs. Can you investigate an ambiguous idea and turn it into something compelling? Can you take an assignment and twist it to create something more interesting?
Demonstrate understanding of how client opinions, production limitations, budget, timelines, and all other manner of constraints should influence your design deliverables.
Example presentation
Here's the presentation I used for reviews when I was a student. It had 4 projects, and I could get through the whole presentation in less than 10 minutes. It doesn't incorporate all the advice above, but it got me a few job offers, so take that as you will. Let's look at how the presentation is structured:
