Do I Need a Portfolio Site?

Beatriz Solano: Office Hours, I'm Beatriz Solano. A listener in Manchester, eight months out of college, wants to know whether to spend her summer building a portfolio website. I asked two people who read portfolios for a living. Sunita Varma is design director at a forty-person brand consultancy, and Owen Garrity hires for a digital product studio in Dublin.

Sunita Varma: Tell her to keep her summer.

Beatriz Solano: That's blunt.

Sunita Varma: It's honest. I get roughly two hundred applications a year. I open the link, I look at one project for about forty seconds, and I read the paragraph where you describe what you personally did. The website around it barely registers.

Owen Garrity: Same for me. A clean PDF of twelve pages does the job. Half the custom sites I see have a loading animation, which means I spend the first four seconds watching a logo spin.

Beatriz Solano: So what makes those forty seconds count?

Sunita Varma: One project shown properly. The brief in two sentences, the constraint, the three directions you rejected and why, the final work in use. If it was a team project, say which parts were yours. When a graduate writes that they did the whole rebrand of a national bank, I know that is not true, and I stop trusting the rest.

Owen Garrity: For product roles I want to see a decision that was hard. A screen before and after usability testing, with the number that changed. Task completion went from sixty-two percent to eighty-eight, that kind of thing. Polished final screens alone tell me you can use Figma.

Beatriz Solano: Is there a case for a site at all?

Owen Garrity: If you design websites for a living, your own site is a sample. Then it has to be fast, accessible and readable on a phone, because I will open it on my phone on the train.

Sunita Varma: Or if you write. A designer who publishes short case notes shows me how they think between projects. That is worth more than a fancy grid.

Beatriz Solano: What puts you off immediately?

Sunita Varma: Mockups of things that do not exist presented as client work. Fake magazine covers. A logo on a tote bag on a model.

Owen Garrity: Passwords. If I need to email you for access, I move on to the next of forty.

Beatriz Solano: How many projects is right?

Sunita Varma: Four. Three strong ones and one that shows a range you have not shown elsewhere.

Owen Garrity: Five at most. Every weak project lowers the average.

Beatriz Solano: So, for Manchester?

Sunita Varma: A twelve-page PDF, four projects, honest captions. Then spend the summer making one more thing worth showing.

Beatriz Solano: Sunita Varma, Owen Garrity, thank you. That's Office Hours.