Your portfolio is a story about you and your work – your expression of growth through all the obstacles, surprises, successes and failures. For you, the act of telling your story is just as important for your growth as the story itself. Here is some advice to help tell your story.
Show your best work
Curate 3-5 projects that align with the kind of work you want to be doing
- Clarify what your audience seeks and accentuate how your expertise, skills, and uniqueness exceed their needs
- Go deep on a few, broad on the rest
Present your solution and the journey
Tell the story about how your design solves a problem in the context of user goals
- Share anecdotes and critical thoughts about the tradeoffs you made
- Show your initial attempts and why they failed
- Your ability to accept that failure and build upon it
Reflect upon your learnings
Demonstrate your capacity for learning, adapting, and growing. What worked well? What would you do differently? How did you deal with your failures?
Sell yourself
Present a rich picture of yourself to potential employers
- Reveals your motivations and values
- Gives the reader a sense of what you enjoy working on
- Helps the audience envision how you can contribute to their team
- Outline accomplishments and what you’re most proud of
Expose how you think
Show and tell key moments of divergent and convergent thinking and output
Craft Your Narrative
Focus on compelling storytelling
- Demonstrate your ability to communicate concisely with words and imagery-showing the what and telling the why
- Prioritize what information your reader needs and focus on the vital moments of the project that make it interesting
Reveal Your Context
Time constraints, limited resources, silos, turf wars, egocentricity, apathy, personal biases, politics and difficult personalities are only a few of the realities that you work with over the course of a project. Talk about what worked and what didn’t work.
Celebrate your accomplishments
Be self-critical and assess the outcome of your work
Be honest and clear about your role
Highlight the projects you were a part of, who your partners were, and what you contributed
- Share credit with your peers and highlight leadership moments
- Claim credit for your innovations and highlight team dynamics and how you helped achieve the goal
Frame the problem and define the goals
Empathy for the people and the problems you were solving for shines through
