Making Your Design Portfolio Awesome: Easy Tips and Mistakes to Avoid

What is going on? All right. In this video we are taking a look at my friend ethan's portfolio@goneback.com Ganback gone back. I think I've always said gang back in my head when I've looked at this, but I'm thinking it's probably gone back. There's probably a story behind that. Alright. He says, if you were hiring, what would you like to see in my portfolio? My first impression of this website in general is really good. I think this looks pretty solid. I think most portfolios probably go too over the top when really you just need a little bit of text, a little bit about yourself and just really good visuals, really good images on the page so I can check everything out. And this looks good. I like the color scheme, the hierarchy of the typography. I love this little logo. I want to just zoom in, look at that. The light gradients and whatnot. But flat colors. It's flat colors but not gradient and it makes it look chrome. And what is the word? Holographic. I like that it's memorable. I like that a lot. All right. One thing that I noticed right out of the gate is that I was trying to click the image. I would want to see this in anchor tag. So if I click view, it goes to this website. And my only critique about the content here is it says Ethan is a product design manager with a penchant for chopping wood and obsession with Star Wars. I like that. That's a good bio, little one liner. But product design manager is typically in charge of a team that's putting together, for example blockchain.com so I don't know out of the gate, are you showing me the team's work or are you showing me your work? So I almost want to see a secondary page when I click this. It doesn't even necessarily have to be a completely different page or, or it could just be a little bit of extra information like UI design, blah blah blah. I want to know what of this that you are responsible for. And right now it's a little bit unclear just because it's linking to a.com website. And I'm guessing that you didn't necessarily design, develop, code, project manage and do every single thing on your own. So that's just my first initial thought is there's a little bit of a, a question mark in terms of what were you responsible for? Because when I'm thinking manager, I'm thinking overseeing and manage, managing a team of designers who were probably responsible for this. And so I could be Wrong with my assumption. But if you're leaving it up to me to decide while I'm looking at portfolio, then those are some questions that are going off in my mind. And I do this, like, little animation, but I also think that, like, down here, like comment Cruncher, you very obviously designed this tile, this image for this format, whereas this one, it just feels like it's not. Nothing's wrong with it necessarily, but I feel like it could be a little bit more impressive or a more interesting composition. Maybe it's like this part is zoomed up really big right here, and I've got a big feature and maybe some smaller ones over here. Something that's just slightly more interesting than the single screen. That. That's a very petty critique, but it is a critique. And the same thing here. Vault Health. Product design. Like you are saying product design. So probably you posted this, but again, because you're saying product design manager, I don't know if this is something that you managed or if you design. Even though it does say design, I don't know. That's like a question mark. Because typically, if you're looking at a portfolio, then you're looking at the designer did this. And so just simply because you put manager in your bio, now all of a sudden I'm thinking, oh, okay. I don't know if he's actually doing this or not, but I think that you are. And so that's a little bit of a disconnect. Mallow. I think you could totally make use of extra space and blow up these cute little marshmallows really big and make it super interesting. You could even bring up these, even lifting them out of the iPhone and bringing them up really big right here, and then bringing a small iPhone over here, something just to make that composition a little bit more interesting. And it could just be a matter of scaling something up 300% in Figma and playing around with a few different little exercises. Design exercises like that. This one's a little bit more interesting because you're using the hand. I bet that is the Facebook hand library. If you search for Facebook hand images, I think they came out with a design thing. Yeah, look at this diverse device hands. It's actually a good resource that Facebook put out, but I just think it's funny that I know that. Anyway, if you need a diverse device hand, just search for it on Facebook. And there you go. All right, so here's the other critique. Okay, I see product design, mobile app. This looks like a mobile app. This looks like a mobile app. This Looks like a mobile app, but you're also linking to the full website. So are you also doing the website or did you just do the app? So I think there's. It's just a couple of just annoyingly small disconnections between design manager and product design that could be somewhat shored up. So I'm not sure. Seems like you're maybe happy with your job. You're working it. If you go to about it says, I'm working at design manager, working in crypto web 3. So maybe you're working here. So anyway, I'm not sure if you're. I can't give too much prescriptive feedback just because. Are you looking for design work? Are you looking for a design manager job? So even sometimes stating your intent with this or even you're just. I'm happily employed@blockchain.com, whatever. So just a very subtle little messaging thing there. And I also think, okay, you're doing. So you're doing branding. I like this logo a lot, by the way, this little thing. So you're doing some branding, you're doing some product design, and then you're doing some comic book data. I don't know, this almost looks like you design a comic book, which you're saying comic book data. And so maybe it actually is full on website of different appearances of these different things. But just if I'm just glancing really quickly at everything, I'm thinking, okay, logo for Boston Art, logo for Comic Cruncher, and then maybe an interactive thing for Robin and then another sticker pack. I think these sticker packs are super cool. But I almost wonder if you should primarily showcase product design and be specific about what you designed and then maybe some other illustration and branding. It's tricky because I like the fact that I can see you doing branding and things like that and also sticker packs. But if you're specifically looking for a management job, then you might have to have case studies that talk about your role as the manager on the team and, and what you oversaw. So I could. I could see a case study being a little bit more important in that role. Whereas if you're looking for a product design position, you probably need to show more screens, more work, and specifically talk about, I did everything here, so I think you have all the pieces there. It's just a matter of are you going to promote yourself as a manager or promote. Can't talk or promote yourself as a designer. And I'm not sure what you're going for here with your intent, with the Intent of the portfolio. Not that's necessarily a bad thing because you might be happily employed and it might not even matter. And so that is my overall critique of just the intent of the portfolio. I think this is super cool. Like the about page with the back button. I like that a lot. I like the simple little timeline. Nice right alignment here. The dates. You got some nice alignment here. You could potentially. You could potentially put that 20, 23 on the baseline of Design Manager. I can tell that you center align that and that it looks pretty good. It honestly looks pretty good. But I would also be tempted to align it to the baseline and you might even. Let's just do a quick little experiment here just for fun. All right, what if. What if we got rid of that actually, Let me see. All right, that is 18. All right, so now I'm going to make this thing. Where is the font size? I wonder if we. Since all these are 18, I wonder if we could just get rid of experience. You could probably leave it in there. But I like these being smaller like everything else. Just a super, super little subtle thing. Overall though, it looks good. I like it. This is funny too. Now until forever. I would also potentially. I like the haikus. I think this is pretty funny. To dearest colleagues, get the philosophical what's best for users. I like this, but it doesn't look like you have written any in the last two years or more, two and a half years. So I don't think it should be as prominent on this section. I would likely. I would probably just grab this if you really wanted to keep it in and just stick it as a fourth item here. I appreciate the fact that each one of these is linking off to a website. And so if you. Feels a little bit weird to put this. If this is a page linking within the website grouped with a bunch of other links that are linking outside the website, that could be odd. You could even put it in your footer, even maybe if it said gongbak now until forever and then haiku somewhere else. I just don't know if the haikus deserves such a prominent position right here, especially since you're not posting them regularly. But overall, the website itself looks really nice and I think that there's a lot of cool things here. It's just a matter of what is the full intention. 18. These are 18. It's always interesting how the text here, this is 18 and this is 18, which I love to see the same font size. Sometimes when you have this background on these buttons, it can look like they are larger. And so if we went down to 16 on those buttons, we could go 18 here and 16 here. Like two pixel sizes. And because of the negative space surrounding it, it gives it more prominence, which makes it looks larger than it is. So you can see I just changed that one to 18, or I changed the 18s to 16. So now this is 18, this is 16. But you can tell these are like a little bit more. It feels like they're the same kind of weight. And you don't. It's. Sometimes it can be subjective as to whether or not that should be like that, but it's just an interesting thing to check out. So, like, here's the difference between those two. Oh, actually, did I make all that smaller? Oh, it must have. It must have changed when I. I'm sorry, I. I actually changed that when I was messing around with your other thing. So this is actually 24. And these are 18. It was. I remember. I don't know if you remember, but I went in and I changed this. And because this is not loading a new URL, it just seems like it's JavaScript. It actually updated that text as well. So nevermind on that. Overall, I think that's a pretty good place to end it. I think that is my quick review of this portfolio website. Yeah. All right, let me know. Let me know what you think in the comments about the intention of the portfolio. Thank you for watching yet another video. Or maybe this is your first one. If this is your first one, maybe go check out some of the other ones, but I will. I'll see you in the next one.