Why I don’t love designer portfolios (says the guy with a portfolio)

I have always had a slightly awkward relationship with design portfolios. Not because they are useless. Because of the maths.

If someone runs an immaculate portfolio, posts three carousels a week and has a fresh Medium article every month, I can’t help asking myself one quiet question: when exactly do they design?

The double standard

I know, that sounds bitter. It isn’t meant to. Some people are fast, some people love writing, and some have a lot of evenings. Fine.

But I have sat on the other side of the table often enough. And whenever a portfolio was suspiciously perfect, I stopped looking at the portfolio and started looking at the person. How do they talk about their work? Do they explain a messy decision, or do they recite the case study? Does the human in front of me match the PDF?

Sometimes yes. Sometimes it was more packaging than product. A portfolio shows how well you package work. It says surprisingly little about how you do it.

Text bombs and token tutorials

Part of the problem isn’t the designers. The best work most of us ever did sits behind an NDA. So we show what we’re allowed to show, which is rarely what we’re proud of.

The other part is newer. Generating text is free now, and it shows. Case studies have turned into text bombs: 4,000 words, five frameworks, nobody reading past the first heading. And somewhere out there, someone is publishing the ten-thousandth tutorial on how to set up design tokens. In 2026. When nobody writes them by hand anymore.

To be fair, it was boring before AI too. Corporate case studies always read a bit like a press release from the design team. The AI just made it faster.

Play along next time you review a portfolio:

Greenfield heroes

And then there’s the newest genre. “I built a complete design system with Figma and Storybook in three prompts.” Congratulations, honestly. It looks great. It also has very little to do with the job.

Real products are not a green field. They come with ten years of code nobody wants to touch, two and a half frontend frameworks, a Figma library older than half the team, and workflows that exist because someone in 2019 had a very good reason. Nobody remembers the reason. The workflow stays.

Nobody hires a design systems lead to start from zero. They hire you to swap the engines mid-flight.

Full disclosure: I build greenfield toys too. My wall planner took about an hour of prompting. The difference is that it’s for one wall in my living room, not for fifty product teams, and I would never put it on a slide and call it a design system.

What I actually look for

Design is opinionated, up to a point. Beyond that point, the question is a different one: how does this person fit into a team? Can they communicate? Can they take something complex and make it clear, to engineers, to a PM, to a VP with eight minutes between two other meetings?

You don’t need a great portfolio to show that. It shows in a real conversation, usually within the first half hour.

What does catch my eye: work that is honest about the mess, and side quests. Small things people built outside of corporate bullshit, because they wanted to. A weird tool, a home project, something over-engineered for an audience of one. That tells me more about curiosity and taste than any polished process slide.

Standards? I wish

Here’s the irony. I’m a design systems person. I’m a fanboy of standards. A standard portfolio format would make me very happy.

It isn’t going to happen. Hiring in design still runs on old structures: upload your CV here, attach your portfolio there, wait. Meanwhile the job of a product designer changes faster than the job ads describing it.

What I’d rather see: trial days. Spend a day with the team, in the office, on something real. Not a giant remote take-home challenge that eats a weekend and proves mostly that you have a free weekend. Just a day of working together, so both sides can see how it feels. That’s the only test that measures what actually matters.

So why does this site exist?

Fair question. A few reasons.

Self-branding is unavoidable, I get it. But it doesn’t have to be stiff and corporate, and that’s the approach here: real projects, honest texts, a ghost that says rude things on hover.

It’s also a side quest. I use this site to try the latest AI tools and see how far I can automate things cleanly, from the agent that answers questions about me to the plain-text versions for bots. Building a portfolio turned out to be a good excuse for that.

And yes, you’ll notice there are barely any pictures. Half of them are under NDA, the other half died with old laptops. The placeholders are honest about it. That’s more than most portfolios can say.

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Dear hiring managers

Don’t take portfolios so seriously. And please, drop the “a strong portfolio is mandatory” bullshit from your job descriptions, at least as an automatic filter. You are not filtering for good designers. You are filtering for people with free evenings.

Dear designers

Don’t take yourselves too seriously either. Less Medium, more real. And when you apply, offer to just work on something with the team for a day. Most good teams will say yes. The ones who don’t probably told you something too.

Anyway. You’re on my portfolio now. Be gentle.