Thoughts on making UX portfolio websites for fresh graduates seeking a job in the industry

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

Portfolio websites are tricky business. You’re satisfied and unsatisfied at the same time (duh!).

It gets even trickier if you’re a fresh graduate right out of college, struggling to get jobs or internships, looking up at every other portfolio website in the world while looking down at yours.

I was in a similar position by the end of 2022, trying to desperately get my first internship and get something on my CV since all my batchmates had completed multiple by then.

Looking back, here are some considerations that helped me build a portfolio that got me my first ever internship — Adobe.

Understanding the purpose of a portfolio website

A portfolio website does not get you the job.

The portfolio website either makes the recruiter go ‘I’m curious about their work, so let’s call them for an interview to know more’, or makes them go ‘Nah bye’.

As a college graduate, the urge to load your website with projects is super high. However, not catering your portfolio to the kind of job you want to get, in all aspects — Project content, kind of projects, optimising for skim-ability and overall visuals — will fail the website in doing its job.

What should a fresh graduate prioritise for their portfolio website?

I still can’t forget how chaotic applying for jobs was: Sending out hundreds of applications, refining my portfolio based on constant feedback, checking out other portfolios and getting inspired from them. Looking back, here’s what I feel students should prioritise while building a website:

• Speed of putting up case studies: You might need to toggle between what’s present on your website and what’s not. In the midst of applications, interviews and take-home assignments, you might not have much time to do the hard work of arranging a case study on your website, checking for pixel perfection and website responsiveness.
• Speed of making changes: You’re going to get a lot of feedback in this duration. From friends, mentors and interviewers. You want to select a platform where incorporating these changes will be fast without breaking the website. Especially during the time when you have to send loads of applications everyday.

Content > cool visuals

I’ve seen enough portfolio websites where its home page is super beautiful but clicking on any case study takes me to a lengthy medium article or badly composed Behance project.

It’s not Behance or Medium that’s the issue here, it’s the content. It tells me that more effort went into beautifying the landing page than in the projects themselves.

An average-looking but clean and minimal website with high-quality project content will any day work better than a cool looking landing page with bad content.

Thoughts on using Notion, Figma prototypes, Medium or Behance for case studies

Quick disclaimer, I’ve seen folks make their portfolios on all these platforms and get good jobs. Though in my opinion, Notion stands out as the best free alternative amongst all.

You can quickly put up case studies and make changes while maintaining a minimal aesthetic. Compared to that, Figma prototypes are high on effort, Medium articles tend to contain a lot of text and don’t strike a good visual to text balance, and Behance being in its vertical slide based format takes a lot of time to make changes since the slides need to be remade.

However, having a personal website gives you the freedom to curate the impact your visual identity will make on the viewer. First impressions matter.

Well if you do want to build websites…

Go for speed of updating over customizability when choosing a website builder platform.

You don’t need to be a pro web designer with a solid brand visual identity to stand out from your competition. Instead, stand out through your case studies. Choose a website builder that allows you to make changes fast, put up and take down case studies quickly, while keeping the entire website responsive on all platforms. Here’s my opinion on a few of them.

• Squarespace: Expensive, but checks all boxes. You can put up case studies and make changes much faster than the rest of the website builders and is automatically responsive. It offers less customizability compared to the other options and that’s a boon, not a curse. The templates it offers look super professional too. I recovered the amount I had spent for the entire year’s subscription comfortably in my first stipend.
• Framer, Webflow: Cheaper, super customisable and has a steep learning curve. You’ll have to spend a lot of time first learning the interface, then the features and most importantly, making the site responsive. With the customizability offered, you’ll also spend a lot of time trying to make your website look perfect. I won’t prefer this over Squarespace at this point of your journey.
• Wix, EditorX: These options are okay, but most non-preferable of all. I’ve heard a lot of students have issues with both website building and online uptime. I’ve heard of students complaining about others not being able to open their websites due to them crashing on their devices.

Skim-ability of case studies>>>

Analytics from my last Squarespace website tells me that a person spent an average of 61 seconds on a case study, that too on the first 2. That’s a super short span of time!

Design your case study for skim-ability. This means that you need to convey the value of your project and you as a designer in under 60 seconds, especially when the reader will go through everything you’ve put there very superficially.

Always consider that the text you’ve put there will not be read. Does it still communicate your story?

A portfolio website is not all you should have

You only partially have the power to control the narrative of your projects when they’re on a portfolio website. You can’t control which project the viewer will check out, how fast they’ll skim and will they understand the entire story clearly, since they’ll mostly spend around a minute on a project.

This is why a portfolio website is optimised for skim-ability and content is optimised ruthlessly. This is also the reason why they fail as good artefacts for showcasing your work in interviews.

I’d suggest you prepare a slide deck as well for showing your work in interviews. You’ll get around 20–30 minutes to show and talk about your work, so you have the liberty to go deeper into your story, focus on the parts that are important to you and help the audience follow your exact narrative.

When to go custom with your website?

You can go custom with your website once you’re not in a position to make quick iterative changes to cater to deadlines set by interviews and assignments scheduled in your ‘getting hired’ journey. This can either be after you get the internship/job you’re gunning for, or if you start much earlier than the date you would actually need to use your portfolio website.

You will need the freedom to quickly host case studies and make changes all the time before you have that job because your website will go through countless iterations and feedback given by your peers, mentors and interviewers. You don’t want to be in a situation where simply the time needed for making an update costs you opportunities.

To sum up:

1. Cater your portfolio website content to the target job you want, remove everything else.
2. While choosing a platform to build a website, prioritise the ones that help you add and change content faster than the rest.
3. Don’t focus on making a unique website, focus on making a clean, minimal and responsive one. All beautification rests on top of these tenets.
4. Focus on adding quality projects on the website before spending too much time making the website beautiful.
5. You can start out with a Notion website for free. It allows you to add and change content fast, and will not distract you by offering too much customizability.
6. Squarespace is the best beginner option if you want to build custom websites. It allows you to add and change content faster than other website builder platforms and makes all content automatically responsive to all mediums. They have great templates too!
7. Any case study on your website will be skimmed through under 60 seconds. Optimise for skim-ability.
8. Make a detailed slide deck for your interviews. Don’t present the short, skim-able case studies from your website.
9. Its better to get started with crafting your portfolio website much earlier than you’d need it. You’ll have the time to invest in building the website using tools like Framer/Webflow/custom code and won’t need to worry about making tons of changes to it in a short period of time.

These considerations helped me build a website that kickstarted the process of bagging an internship at Adobe. Here are the three most valuable takeaways from the internship.

👋 See you later!

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In case you want to check out my work in the meantime, please visit my portfolio website here. I’m always open to chat about any new adventures, crazy ideas or just all things design on LinkedIn and Twitter.