Creating first portfolio...
Say what? I’m young in my career (roughly 4.5 years experience) but I haven’t had to create a document online or offline that walks through my work. The 2 jobs I’ve had, I feel like I’ve snuck in without having to curate a bunch of work. Here is the real challenge, most of my work is with a large design consultancy where my days are spent identifying what we should design in order to solve some blue sky and strategy type of brief — but now I would love to go in-house to work on real products and not just ones I make up for the client. Any suggestions on how to show strategy, future-forward work to companies that are more focused on your mobile app experience and # of shipped products?
The design process is more important than the final outcome. Focus on major points of discussion during the project (A key technology you were trying to evaluate... How the market landscape affected your decisions ... How you approached a nebulous request from a client or stakeholder, etc.). Too often I see design candidates in your position be super vague or describe their projects like a marketing ad. The more you can talk about the difficult/interesting challenges the better. Good luck!
This was exactly my experience. I spent several years doing blue-sky work, but I carefully documented the entire process to show not only understanding customer situations, thinking, and behavior patterns but also how we’d actually build what we proposed. The final deliverables were strong, but the most interesting stuff was the research and sketches and early prototypes. Every team within every company is different, but it’s generally better that a designer be able to “think big” and clearly articulate how they conceive and design a grand vision than just be really good at shipping. The ideal is a blend of each. It’s hard to teach imagination and vision. It’s also hard to work with developers and manage complex dependencies. Doing that at a really high level is exceptionally difficult, but you can learn it. I’ve worked with countless designers who can crank out buildable stuff, but fewer who can envision something potentially game-changing. Message me if you’d like to see pieces of my portfolio. Happy to talk more.
Happy to help if you have a portfolio link. I went through a kind of similar challenge, but scraped through. DM me if I you think I could help.