Hello!
Today I'm thinking about job hunting, specifically that the world you're applying for a job in no longer exists. There are remnants of it in bigger, older companies, but not for long. Why? Because the job descriptions most people are applying against assume a workflow that's already gone. For years, designers worked "out ahead" of engineering in mockups. Now development teams are "out ahead" of design, with new features becoming code at a furious pace, and design's job shifts toward making all that output fit together. At the Design Futures Assembly this spring, close to half of designers had shipped AI-generated code to production, and at the best teams the "stack" was dozens of internal tools that change month to month. Try writing a stable job req for that. So the natural reaction is to grab every tool and try to do every role. Designers pick up coding agents, developers spin up layouts, and everyone ends up here: That approach spreads us thinly across multiple complex and important jobs. I can play a developer on TV, but in real life I'm a pretty crappy one. The better move is the lesson we taught designers at Yahoo! years ago: double down on the thing you're uniquely good at and apply it elsewhere. So if you're looking for work right now, don't optimize for the job posting. Get hands-on with the tools, figure out what they can and can't do, and show how your particular superpower reaches further because of them. That's the job that actually exists.
Been working on my portfolio, then the other day I asked, why?
Fair question, especially after I just told you the job world you're applying into is disappearing. But yes, I still think you need a portfolio, especially if you're on the visual design side of things. What it's for is shifting, though.
When I go through candidates, the first thing I look at is the portfolio. I'm not reading case studies in depth, just looking at the end result. What I'm looking for is taste (I know, overused word), meaning the visual integrity, completeness, and coherence of the solutions. Is there craft and a desire to bring things into harmony? Does the design clearly communicate its intention? That stuff is hard to fake, and it's most clearly shown through your actual work.
And that matters even more now. Earlier I mentioned design's job shifting toward making a flood of fast-moving output fit together. Making things coherent is exactly that skill, and your portfolio is where you prove you have it.
Where most portfolios go wrong is spending all their energy on the wrong kind of "work." In big companies, getting design done takes so many meetings, processes, and sign-offs that designers begin to view that as their primary job. But being great at navigating an organization doesn't necessarily mean being great at design. Add in design systems and UI toolkits and it becomes hard to know how a designer designs and why.
So if you're going to keep working on it, go deep on a couple of examples. Walk through the 'why' at a big picture level, and then the 'how' at a detailed level. Why did you pick that solution? What iterations got you there? How did your unique contributions as a designer, not just as an employee or team member, make the impact you intended?
In other words, ditch the org chart war stories and lead with the work. If it shows your taste and your decisions, that's a really good answer to "why?"