How writing advice helped me create a more focused design portfolio
Why creating an easy throughline allows you to stand out from the crowd
Hey everyone, this is the last Friday article for a while as I prepare for the second cohort of my Data-Informed Design course. -Kai
The best portfolio advice I got for my design career came from a copywriting coach.
What he said about building an audience for my writing has been a valuable strategy for standing out in an otherwise crowded design market. Don’t be a generalist designer: build an umbrella.
Doing so allows you to showcase your strengths while allowing others to see your strengths at a glance easily. Here’s how this technique works.
The umbrella: copywriting technique applied to UX design
When I started writing articles four years ago, I didn’t have a particular audience in mind. As a result, I often wrote about anything that came to mind. Whether it was swimming, Eastern philosophy, UX Design, or any number of topics, I treated writing as my blog.
However, when I started getting more serious about writing, my copywriting coach helped me understand why this didn’t work. Simply put, if you want an audience to come back to read your articles consistently, they need to know what they are getting.
For example, if you wrote about 18th-century fashion, blockchain, and travel tips, you wouldn’t succeed with any audience. People would come to you to read blockchain articles, find random articles on Victoria-era fashion, and leave.
However, I didn’t need to be hyper-specific about a niche, either: that was a sure way to run out of topics to discuss. Instead, the idea was simple: form an umbrella of related topics to write about to keep your audience coming back.
For example, if you were to write about travel, you might talk about travel tips, international food, traveling with kids, basic language phrases, and a couple of other related topics.
These aren’t the same topic, but they’re related under the umbrella of "travel,” so audiences can always return and know what to expect.
You might be asking yourself, that’s nice, but how does that apply to design? As it turns out, it’s very similar. For many of you, your design portfolio and experience is a mish-mash of random projects, from large enterprise organizations to your friend’s startup.
As a result, it can be challenging for recruiters, interviewers, and other interested parties to know who you are or what you excel at. So, by structuring your portfolio under an “umbrella”, you can easily stand out amongst an otherwise faceless crowd.
But to do that, you need to identify the core of your umbrella, otherwise known as the throughline.
The throughline, or how random things form a story.
The throughline is a concept from journalism, where a consistent theme, idea, or narrative runs throughout an article, story, or portfolio presentation.
In some ways, it’s the backbone that connects every part of your content, and identifying your throughline is the quickest way to make yourself understandable at a glance.
For example, my projects are all over the place: I’ve worked for federal organizations and startups, healthtech, B2B, SaaS, enterprise UX, and more.
However, knowing my throughline makes it much easier to identify who I am and make myself easily understood by interviewers.
My throughline is, “I break down complex problems, and visualize it to help others understand.” Whether creating data visualizations from cancer statistics or modeling complex networks of hundreds of devices, this throughline applies to all my experiences.
While my throughline could still be refined, it’s still a quick and easy way for others to understand who you are. It’s not just me who uses them: here are some other throughlines I’ve encountered.
Debbie Levitt is easily understood as the “Mary Poppins of CX/UX,” who comes in and sets organizations in order in record time.
I met another designer who called herself an “AI-driven UX Designer” and showed how she uses AI within her UX process.
Yet another called himself a “Motion Design Whiz” because he focused solely on Interaction and Motion Design.
These sorts of throughlines, which speak to the core of your design experience, are a way to get noticed and understood by others quickly. I will address one downside: this may make you slightly less desirable for specific jobs. After all, if someone is a “Motion Designer,” he may not stand out for a job calling for a traditional UX designer.
However, that’s probably for the best. I’ve seen a ton of scattershot, vague, generic portfolios not only from Junior Designers but also from Seniors. These portfolios are hard for hiring managers to understand, so they may not get far in interviews.
It’s better to have a targeted portfolio that you can only apply to 50 jobs rather than a generic one that allows you to apply to 500. You’re much more likely to get a callback in those 50 jobs since it appears that you are a strong candidate for those jobs.
However, that doesn’t mean you’re ‘stuck’ once you get involved in specific jobs. If you have a history of e-commerce jobs and hate the field, finding the right throughline (not just “I work in e-commerce”) can help you change your field and still have a unified portfolio.
And this starts with looking at the design process.