BenBen's Portfolio Cheat Sheet

Recently, I've found myself energized by conversations with designers in school or early in their careers. Shoutout to everyone I've met from RIT and Figma (especially Liwen & Yeunjae for proofreading this for me!) These conversations have been refreshing, and I hope I've provided feedback that's both helpful and reassuring.

Several themes have emerged from these portfolio reviews, so I thought I'd share them as a sort of cheat sheet for anyone working on their design portfolio. Whether you're a design student preparing to graduate, an early-career designer refining your presentation, or someone switching into design from another field—these tips are for you.

1. Make It Yours

First and foremost, remember that it's your portfolio. There's no right or wrong way to do it. Create it how you think it should be made. That said, In today's job market, you only have a few seconds to catch a hiring manager's attention before they move on to the next portfolio. Anything you can do to make yourself stand out is a game changer.

Don't be afraid to be different! Making your portfolio stand out and reflect your unique personality adds tremendous value. Hiring managers and other designers want to get a sense of who you are. They'll HOPEFULLY become your boss or colleagues spending 40 hours a week with you, so they naturally want to know what you're passionate about!

One of my favorite portfolios and interviews was with a candidate who absolutely loved painting. They had a whole section of their site dedicated to their paintings (which were amazing!). It wasn't the main center point of their site, but seeing their painting style, it instantly clicked on how they incorporated some of their paint style in their decks and presentations. It was truly awesome, and showcased a skill they had that made them stand out! At the time we were looking for someone to do more illustrations and it was a huge plus to have someone that understood different mediums.

2. Hierarchy First!

Hierarchy is absolutely key. Being able to organize type and images will be your most frequently used skill in any design job. Whether it's presentations, critiques, or even meeting notes. Make sure your hierarchy and typography are dialed in.

Too many type sizes/weights. While this can work, it often distracts from your work. Try sticking to a few consistent sizes and styles.
Right-aligned or justified text. There's a time and place, but usually not for text in websites or products.
Text-heavy sections lacking clear hierarchy. Create obvious main points that can be grasped in seconds, as people typically skim these sections.
Inconsistent spacing and alignment, make sure everything is lined up and spaced well. Doesn't mean you have to use a grid, but if you want to they are helpful for a reason! (I personally find them a bit limiting, but I am a glutton for punishment)

Responsive Considerations: Remember that your hierarchy needs to work across devices. What looks well-spaced on a desktop might become cramped on mobile. Test your portfolio at different screen sizes and ensure your most important information remains prominent regardless of device.

I've seen case studies transform from walls of uniform text to scannable narratives simply by adding clear headings, pull quotes, and varying text weights to emphasize key points. The same content becomes significantly more digestible with proper hierarchy

It's also a good to think about accessibility, make sure your text is readable, buttons are tappable on mobile etc. Now with new figma color pickers this should be even easier to test!

These skills will become your most valuable assets. If you put time and effort into anything, this should be it! You can learn a lot on the job when it comes to ideation, craft and process, but hierarchy is a pre-requisite to any of those skills.

3. Technical Considerations

Check your font rendering on different monitors and web browsers. Not everyone uses a MacBook Pro or Chrome, so there may be bugs or rendering issues you're unaware of. And especially nowadays, make sure your text is scrape-able by AI. Tools like Greenhouse are what a lot of recruiters use to do initial passes at portfolios and if it can't read your site you might get looked over.

4. The Deck Trick

If I have one killer tip, it's this: focus on making an exceptional presentation deck first. This might seem counterintuitive, but building the deck before the website helps tremendously:

You'll eventually need the deck anyway for portfolio reviews
A deck is generally easier to iterate on quickly than a website, and you can edit and curate faster.
Once you have the deck, you can engineer your site to provide the cliff-notes version of each case study.

The biggest trick of all? Just add an overview for your case study with a button linking to your full deck. People care about seeing your work, not necessarily how great your web development skills are (unless you're a front-end developer!)

5. Storytelling Your Process

One trick that really helped me when I was making my porfolio in college is to remember that people don't know things until you tell them. The difficult team dynamics, the project prompt you disliked, or the countless iterations you went through might be important to you, but could distract from your work's story. This works both ways! If there's something you don't like about your project... you don't have to show it! Your portfolio should showcase work you're proud of and the type of work you want to do more of.

Context Setting: Be crystal clear about your role in team projects. "I led the UX research phase and collaborated with two other designers on the final UI" is much more informative than "We created a new app." This helps hiring managers understand your specific contributions.

Over-communicating Process: There's a tendency to show every single part of the process, but in reality not every part is necessary or adds value. It also means some sections are worth more than others. For instance, there's a common trend to show the end results first, then dive into details after. It's a great way to show your skills, getting people hooked first, then reel them in with your knowledge about the design process.

Finding the Balance: Show enough iteration to demonstrate thoughtful exploration (2-3 key decision points), but avoid overwhelming viewers with every sketch and alternative. Focus on the iterations or parts of the process that taught you something significant or led to important breakthroughs.

6. Career Focus

It's great to like a lot of different things, but be clear about what you want to do and what jobs you're looking for. While it's great to have different interests, and use a portfolio to show them all off (which you should! It's yours!), be clear about whether you want to be considered for a Product Design role, a Graphic Design role etc. This helps recruiters know if you are relevant to their specific role they are looking for!

Multi-Role Strategy: If you want to be considered for more than one role, make a toggle or add something to your navigation that can help a recruiter find relevant work. For example:

A filter system (Product Design, Brand Design, UX Research) that can reorder your projects to the most relevant order.
Role-specific landing pages with curated project selections
Clear project tags indicating which skills each project demonstrates

Student vs. Professional Work: If you're early in your career, quality student projects are perfectly acceptable—just make sure they demonstrate real-world problem-solving. As you gain professional experience, gradually phase out student work unless it showcases skills not evident in your professional projects.

Spend your time on the high value things. Think quality > quantity and storytelling > flashy. Curating 2-3 really quality end-to-end case studies is far more valuable than showing 6-7 projects that can seem all over the place. Likewise, micro-interactions and animations are awesome, but if it is going to take 10x as long and comes at the expense of explaining a project succinctly, then it might be worth reevaluating if you need them.

7. Getting and Processing Feedback

Feedback is great, but it shouldn’t be prescriptive. When you get feedback on your portfolio (or any project for that matter) part of your job as a professional is distilling down what feedback does or doesn't make sense. That doesn't mean don't listen to people! But it also means don't follow exactly what someone tells you to do. I will guarantee you will get different feedback from different people (me included if you are still reading this!)

Peers: For honest, detailed critiques and fresh perspectives
Mentors: For industry context and professional standards
Hiring Managers/Recruiters: For insights into hiring processes and expectations
Non-designers: For clarity and initial impressions

"Does my role in this project come across clearly?"
"Is the problem statement easy to understand?"
"Which project feels strongest to you and why?"
"Is there anything confusing or missing from my process explanation?"

If you're constantly trying to please everyone you're going to end up burnt out and frustrated. I like to think of it like user testing, if you get feedback from a wide variety of people you can take common themes that emerge as areas you might want to make some changes. If you get a random one-off idea here or there maybe just think on it a bit and see if it makes sense to you before changing it up!

Ask around! Generally speaking, designers are friendly creatures! We all like talking about design and usually coffee/other hot beverages. Reach out to a designer at a company you might be interested in and see if they have feedback. I think you would be surprised how willing people are to help you out, chances are they were in your shoes not that long ago!

8. One last section

Last tip, take it one step at a time. I learned this from my friend Ryan about my own portfolio (the one you're on now!) You don't have to do it all at once, just slowly iterating over time and adding piece by piece can help make a large task feel a little less daunting. It also means you don’t have to figure it all out at once, you can always change something later!

Alright that's it! I'm sure I'm forgetting something, or someone will call me out for giving bad advice, but hey this is my portfolio and I can make it how I want too :)

I have been making more time for portfolio reviews and chit chats throughout the week. If you've applied these tips and want feedback on your portfolio, reach out to me on LinkedIn or email me! And if you have other tips that have worked well for you, I'd love to hear them!