A Million Qualified Designers, Only One You
Make Your Portfolio Stand Out
Collect work from both — variety shows range and initiative beyond what was assigned.
Note where you went beyond the brief and applied your own thinking.
Show sketches, iterations, and decisions — process is what separates designers.
Voice, perspective, and personal interests should come through — generic portfolios get skipped.
Wade and Leta, Brian LaRossa, Pedro Sanches — borrow structural ideas, not work.
Hiring managers see hundreds of technically competent portfolios. The designers who stand out tell a coherent story about why they design, what they care about, and how they think — not just what they made.
Noble Desktop's Graphic Design Certificate helps you develop a distinctive visual voice and the professional skills that make one designer stand out from the rest.
If a potential employer or client is looking at your design portfolio, they saw or heard something that made them want to examine your work and learn more about you.
As you assemble your portfolio, put yourself in the shoes of a potential employer or client who might review your portfolio for one of these reasons:
- They may have gotten a recommendation from someone that you would be a good fit for a project or position.
- They might be impressed by an application you submitted.
- They might have connected with you through the skills and qualifications you posted at LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, or one of the other job posting and networking channels.
In short, if a potential employer or client is looking at your portfolio, that means you’ve got a foot in the door. And that’s good!
The implications? Your portfolio is the place to seal the deal, hit the ball out of the park, wow the audience… OK, we’re running out of cliches here. But the point is, your portfolio is where you really sell your skills and yourself.
Remember, a potential client or employer is going to be able to find other designers with identical or similar skill sets. You’re not the only talented and driven young designer coming out of class and entering the world of professional design.
Be multidimensional, but not an open book
One way to distinguish yourself is by including projects that showcase your passions, talents, and interests outside of commercial or school assignments. If you have sketches, app prototypes, or posters you created in relation to those passions, they can help distinguish you.
Have you created…
- A photo essay of your neighborhood?
- An app to create your own music?
- A video documenting your morning run?
- A comic book character?
When you curate what you select to present your passions and “outside the box” interests, keep your audience in mind. You don’t want to make a client or employer commit to agreeing with your distaste for a certain style of clothing, or support for a specific political perspective in order to appreciate your skills and talents and give you work.
The purpose of sharing passions and interests that are not directly connected to commercial projects is that it gives a sense of what you bring to the table in approaching design challenges.
- A photo essay might reveal your key for light, architecture, or capturing people.
- An app prototype for your music might demonstrate the ability to present audio.
- A short documentary on your morning run might demonstrate endurance, energy, and perseverance.
- A comic book character could demonstrate your sense of humor, your drawing skills, your storytelling abilities.
These (and many others) could be valuable assets.
Wade and Leta
The multi-dimensional design team of Wade and Leta makes a major statement with an animated, interactive landing page on their portfolio. Leta Sobierajski, the “Leta” in Wade and Leta. She has worked as an independent designer with clients such as Adobe, Bloomberg Businessweek, Google, Gucci, IBM, The New York Times, Refinery 29, Renault, Target, and UNIQLO among many others.
Leta Sobierajski goes deeply into her studio’s body of work and approach to promoting it in an interview in the Making the Transition from Design Student to Working Professional series. Here’s a look at her studio’s portfolio landing page.
Brian LaRossa
Brian LaRossa is a highly successful art director at a major publishing house. If you’re interested in Brian LaRossa’s expert advice on making the transition from design student to working professional, check out this conversation with him on that topic.
Brian’s portfolio landing page is an essay (!) that provides links to typography and other design and creative projects.
Pedro Sanches
Finally, let’s look at the highly unconventional portfolio landing page of game designer Pedro Sanches. In his interview in the series Making the Transition from Design Student to Working Professional, he reveals that “I made this weird 3D website, and it had no portfolio material at all. It was very scrappily done but it ended up being what got me a job at Google.”
Visitors draw on a canvas that interacts with Pedro’s scribblings and work. A static depiction of that approach can’t do it justice.
Key Takeaways