How to lay out your design portfolio to make your work stand out | by Kai Wong

Defining Goals, Problems, and Solutions help interviewers evaluate your portfolio in favorable terms

When I helped my organization hire a new designer, I was shocked at how many design portfolios went wrong at the first step.

I’m not a hiring manager and don’t have access to all the criteria for specific design positions. Still, I noticed several designers make a critical mistake: they don’t define how they want their portfolios to be evaluated.

They either follow a linear process, which raises red flags, or don’t do enough to clearly explain a project’s Goal, Problem, and Solution, often forcing them to be evaluated using visuals.

Laying out your progress and the problem you’re trying to solve (and how you solved it) is critical in conveying that you know how to work as a designer.

Here’s why that’s important.

The first mistake designers make is failing to frame the problem

Designers love to say they are problem solvers, but saying that discounts a lot of your hard work around framing problems.