The first step on the pathway to a job requires that you make a lasting impression. With that in mind, think back to the last time you applied for a job.

Did you apply via a job site? Perhaps you submitted your resume and waited patiently for someone to respond.

Design positions are different. Unlike other fields, designers can display their skills to potential employers without ever talking with the company.

That’s because your design portfolio can open doors for you.

Knowing the potential, designers often produce glossy personal websites that shine, while lacking many of the fundamental elements that make a design portfolio worthwhile.

Any portfolio that doesn’t display how a designer thinks or deals with adversity is a non-starter.

A decade or two ago, you could have strolled into an office with a binder full of interesting visual work, and that would be enough to land a job. That only grew during the ‘move fast and break things’ era when just being able to ship a product reigned supreme. That flawed mentality is rapidly fading as the industry wrestles with looming scandals weekly. Now, employers are actively seeking out designers who can help create ‘minimum virtuous products.’

Having the glossiest portfolio isn’t enough to draw attention anymore. You need to show how you think — and to do that, you’re going to need to create compelling case studies.

The audience

There is no shortage of places to sprinkle your portfolio’s URL, and that’s going to bring a lot of different eyeballs to your site.

In the sea of faces that might visit your portfolio, there are two primary groups that you want to reach. I refer to these groups as Scanners and Divers based on their activity while visiting your site. The job titles associated with these groups will change from one company to the next, but the primary action they perform remains the same.

Source: stories.freepik.com, newpragmatic.com

Scanners is the first group to encounter your site, and they won’t stay very long. A Scanner will review at all the applicants en masse to help determine which portfolios deserve a second look. The whole point of this exercise is to eliminate applicants that are not fit. Anyone that is involved with hiring at the company doing the hiring could be a Scanner. Portfolios that hit the mark our first group are passed onto a small group or individual going through the selected portfolios in much greater detail.

The detail seekers are our previously mentioned Divers, and they do what you might expect — they dig into the details of your portfolio. By nature of the whittling process, Divers review significantly fewer portfolios but are more likely to be involved in the interview process. They spend time reviewing your work in detail. While a Scanner might be someone from the HR department, a Diver is generally going to be a subject matter expert.

There is one final audience that you will need to reach — you. Of all the people who might read your case study, you’ll be the person who uses it the most. It will become the common thread of many conversations you have with employers and other designers. Case studies provide a prewritten script for these discussions that you’ll need to draw from and add color to where required.

The structure

If you’ve spent any time reading case studies, you realize that most are lengthy by nature. While some case studies are far too long for the content they contain, others appear to breeze by because of how the information is structured.

The structure of your case studies should reflect the different audiences that are coming to your portfolio. Aiming at two different audiences simultaneously seems like a difficult task until you realize there is a well-documented storytelling format that we can use.

The inverted pyramid is a storytelling method that frontloads a story with critical information before becoming more granular in detail. The format is a staple of journalism, where stories compete for the attention of a reader. The goal of the inverted pyramid is to deliver essential information to the reader as quickly as possible. If a reader leaves early, they still get value out of the time they invested.

Source: newpragmatic.com

For your case study, the inverted pyramid creates a movie trailer for the Scanners, while delivering the lengthy feature presentation to the Divers who arrive later. Everyone receives the information they are seeking.

The format

A traditional inverted pyramid has no noticeable beginning or ending, aside from the detail of the information itself. By imposing a format onto a case study, designers signal to the Scanners and Divers which portions were written for each group.

You’ll construct the overview section of your case study with the Scanner in mind. A compelling overview will do all of the following:

• Convey what the product or service does (one-to-two sentences)
• Identify the main problems
• Outline the final solution
• The role you played on the team (and who was on the team)
• The design artifacts that you produced
• Display what the actual product looks like
• Provide a link to a prototype/deployed site

The external link is a signpost for the Scanner, providing an explicit action to take. The Diver won’t be distracted by this shiny object, because their interest in your work is just beginning.

Source: newpragmatic.com

The process section of your case study will provide insight into how you tackle problems and bounce back from issues that occurred during the project. Your process section will likely include, but is not limited to, the following:

• How you researched the project
• Target user information
• Display of the iterative arc of visual solution
• Analysis of testing rounds

It is good to include another link to the prototype/deployed site near the bottom of the case study. By repeating the link, you provide the Diver with a logical action to take when they reach the end of your case study.

What you learned

Regardless of your experience level, every project offers an opportunity to grow. Even projects that cover familiar territory will often force you to view an issue from a new perspective.

Employers are trying to minimize the amount of work they need to prepare for the job. This is why experience is weighted so heavily.

For this reason, you should have a ‘what I’ve learned’ section for every project in your portfolio. The downside to this is minimal, while the upside is huge as it shows that you can learn — a significant factor in any hiring decision.

The only question is where to place this section in your portfolio.

Source: newpragmatic.com

If you are relatively new to the industry, I would include this in the project overview. Be sure to introduce the project effectively, so people understand what the project is, but any time after that is fair. You can even split this into two parts, giving broad bullet points in the introduction and linking to a more in-depth discussion lower in your case study.

When you spend time studying case studies from mid-career or late-career designers, you’ll notice a shift in basic case study structure. The work itself logically takes center stage because there is more of it. While the observations and process will sometimes wilt from view over time, I would encourage you to continue sharing where possible (NDA’s can limit what you are allowed to say about your work.)

Finish strong

The usability of your portfolio site matters to employers, so it’s good to make it easy for visitors to navigate to other areas of your portfolio from the bottom of your case study. While each portfolio will have a different structure, poor usability is not a feature, so invest some time determining where people should go when they finish with the case study.

Solid examples

While I’ve helped hundreds of students launch their design careers, a designer must find their voice when crafting their case studies. Every designer has different strengths, and if those are on display, your case study should take a different direction from your peers’ effort.

With that in mind, I’m including a range of case studies for review. The examples shown belong to designers from across the spectrum of industry experience.

Do not weigh the value of your current efforts against this body of work. Instead, use these examples to inspire future work.

Further review

Case Study	Designer
Box Annotations	Vandana Pai
Break Thru	Ben Howard
Fruition	Cody Dennis
Get Tested COVID-19	Tejal Shah
Wordguess	Rachel Schmitz