How to build a portfolio that will get you a job
Design Better’s guide to showing your work, drawn from live critiques with people who do the hiring.
What Portfolio Club taught us about designing a great portfolio
Of everything you’ll ever design, your portfolio is the hardest to see clearly: you’re too close to judge it the way a stranger would. It’s also easy to spend your energy on styling and lose sight of whether the work itself is presented well. And before styling even matters, there’s the technical work of building the site, which stalls plenty of good portfolios in a Figma file. Claude Code and tools like it can clear that path without taking over your creative decisions, and we’ll walk through how later in this guide.
This guide draws on Design Better’s Portfolio Club critiques, where designers who’ve hired at Apple, Google, Adobe, and beyond review real portfolios on camera. Matt D. Smith, Bob Baxley, Daniel Burka, Brooke Hopper, Jared Erondu, Dan Harden, and Joey Primiani have each spent an hour with us, and their perspective runs through everything below, so you see your own work the way a hiring manager will.
Your portfolio may be the most valuable tool in your career, which matters now, with designers anxious about what AI is doing to the job market. The best answer to that anxiety is action, not reassurance. Build the portfolio. Find the job you want. Stop worrying about the changing world. Start designing for it.
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Portfolio design principles
1. The work is the hero. Target 80–90% images, 10–20% text.
2. Your portfolio is a brochure, not a self-portrait. Its one job is to get you a conversation.
3. Lead with the result. Explain afterward.
4. Write for someone who has five minutes. That’s what you get, if you’re lucky.
5. Show the before. Impact is invisible without a baseline.
6. Say specifically what you do. Vague positioning filters you out of everything.
7. Show only the work you want more of. You’ll be hired to do whatever is on the page.
8. Attach numbers, and admit what went wrong. Both signal seniority.
9. Give credit precisely, and be generous with it.
10. Typography is the tell. It’s the first thing another designer reads about your judgment.
11. Let personality through. People are deciding whether they want to work with you.
12. Make it trivial to update. A portfolio that’s painful to edit goes stale.
13. Show that you can use the new tools. This is now a competency you’re assessed against.
