5 Ways to Make Your Student Design Portfolio Stand Out to Employers

These past few months I’ve reviewed many student design portfolios for a career fair and mentorship event and noticed a few things.

First, student portfolios have unique challenges:

• The entire class, who all have the same projects as you, are competing for the same summer internships or entry level jobs.
• The projects are mostly (if not all) conceptual, and done in a very compressed time frame that doesn’t give you enough time to be as thorough as you want.
• This is one of the first portfolios you’ve ever made, and you feel like it’s never going to be good enough!

Second, I noticed several repeating blind spots in student portfolios. If addressed, they would greatly improve the overall attractiveness of the work to a team looking to hire an intern or junior-level designer. Here are my top 5 things to keep an eye out for.

1. Give a “why” to the project

Yes, your professor may have told you to design a chair/app/medical device. But the project is more than just a chair/app/medical device, what makes yours different? Help the audience become more emotionally interested in your work by providing a reason for its existence, beyond the project brief. Put yourself in the hiring manager’s shoes; they probably see portfolio after portfolio from your classmates with the same student projects in them, what makes yours different? Try these approaches: relate the work to a personal experience, clearly define your users and use cases, and/or share some thoughtful research that led to your exploration of this problem space.

2. Even out the story

When I was still in design school, my TA’s gave me a powerful piece of advice: it is ok to show work that you did outside of the original time constraints for the project. Didn’t have time to make wireframes for one of the user flows before the due date? No problem, add them in later! Hiring managers just want to see if you can do the work and do it well. It is ok to add more to your project once it’s “done” or tweak some parts. If you look through your process artifacts (research, sketches, renderings, wireframes, prototypes, etc.) and find that you are missing some steps in between, fill in the work to round out your project and story.

3. Call out key decisions

Why is your final design the way it is? Oftentimes it is easy to forget when creating a portfolio that the audience won’t be able to read your mind. It may feel obvious at times, but it is critical to guide the reader step-by-step through your thinking. A portfolio that clearly articulates key decisions is much more powerful than one that assumes the audience will take the final design at face value. I have found it useful to pretend to explain my project to a friend aloud, and then writing down the phrases I say. Even more powerful is tying key decisions to research and discoveries from your process — after all, that is what you will be doing as a professional designer!

4. Make it personal

What impression about you the designer do you want to get across to the audience for your portfolio? Perhaps you are transitioning to design from a different background, or your cultural heritage is a big part of your identity, or you have a deep interest in user research. Does your portfolio go beyond the what of projects and give the reader a sense of the who behind them? Letting your personality and interests shine through in your work and portfolio design has the dual benefits of making it more memorable and more fun to create. Unlike most real-world projects you’ll encounter later on in your career, student projects are generally very open-ended and constraint-free, which provide an excellent framework for showcasing what makes you stand out as a designer.

5. Show the product in context

While beautiful product renderings on a white background or angled close-up shots of an app screen are very visually appealing, they sometimes leave out the most important part of a design: the humans that are supposed to use it. Showing the product being used in context not only strengthens the use case but also demonstrates an understanding of the bigger picture and how your concept would be used by real people to improve their lives. Did you test your product concept out in the wild? Show the reader how it went! To take it even further, end your project by tying back to your problem statement and speak to how you did (or did not) accomplish the goals set out in the beginning.

Portfolios are a whole project unto themselves and will evolve over time as your career progresses. In every year since I’ve begun my design career, I’ve completely re-created my portfolio from the ground up as my understanding of design grew, first as a student, then as a practicing professional. With every iteration, I incorporate bits and pieces from portfolios I’ve found inspirational, and also see my own work in a different light. I hope you will find these five tips helpful in your portfolio (student or otherwise), and please share with me any thoughts you have!