Pretty pictures aren’t everything
This post is part of a larger series of posts aimed at helping designers present themselves online. Learn more about “Crafting Your UX Portfolio” here.
When most people think “design portfolio”, they think of a pristine page, with thumbnails of beautiful, pixel-perfect, feel-good visual masterpieces.
If you visit the Popular tab on Dribbble, that’s getting close to what most people imagine. Look at the shiny! Look at the 3D iPhone mockup! Look at that aesthetically pleasing dashboard! Wow! Oooooo ahhhh!
Errrrrwit. Hold on!
Your design portfolio needs to be much more then just a bunch of pretty pictures. You need to share your stories, your process, your constraints and real-life struggles and successes.
Your story is more powerful than the screenshots of the final product. A design process is repeatable, but the results (beautiful UI, pixel-perfect icons, wall-pinned user flow mapping) may not be the same every time.
Even the most visually delicious things (like a logo or identity) have a story to goes behind the veneer to talk about the process and decisions.
What if my visual design isn’t that strong?
We get a lot of questions from designers who don’t have great visual design (yet.) That’s totally ok.
Design is much more than the final styling. There’s research, exploration, experimentation, testing, critique, doing it wrong, doing it not so right, doing it a little better, doing something that worked well(!), and all the tiny details along the process.
You’ll be sharing that process.
So I don’t need any visual design?
That’s not the point. Great design is both how it works and what it looks like. Function and form. You can have a good design (heck, even a great design) that doesn’t invoke a lot of emotion (doesn’t “feel” beautiful), but it gets the job done. Think Craigslist, Gmail, Meetup, Amazon, Wikipedia, etc.
Sure, the best designs do both: Airbnb, HotelTonight, Spotify, Dropbox.
But not everyone has a chance to work on those. Not yet. So show off what you got, and perhaps one day, you’ll have a project you can be proud of showing off every little UI bit, but also sharing the functionality behind it all.
Next up → “Structuring your work with case studies”
