10 years of a UX design portfolio

2023 marked as the 10th anniversary of me getting into the UX industry since graduating from grad school. Throughout this time, I’ve been revamping my online portfolio every couple years, each time with a different approach and mindset. As I’m reviewing some old work and updating my longly-neglected online portfolio (again!), I think it’d be a fun exercise to reflect on how my online portfolio has evolved and how my perspective towards UX portfolio changed over time in the past decade.

4 portfolios in chronological order

Portfolio 2012 | The very first portfolio

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This is the very first online portfolio I’ve ever made in my career out of 2-week assignment in a grad school design class. The excessive sense of amateurism felt so nostalgic! 😄

First, it was at the time when there were limited school programs globally that teach UX, let alone UX bootcamps. “User experience design” was still somewhat a novel concept to many tech companies compared to pure visual design. Many companies wanted to get outside help from big name design agencies to adopt “design thinking” approach into their process. So it was still somewhat a differentiator for UX designers to emphasize on their “design process” in a portfolio — usually with a form of “post-it notes on whiteboards” — to stand out from other pixel-pusher type of designers. Second, the portfolio was full of conceptual prototypes without actual shipped products — a typical characteristic of “student” work. Lastly, the bad typography, misaligned spacing, and low-res images summed up the whole amateur theme. To be honest, it was pretty entertaining to look at with my eye in 2023! 😂

To give myself some credit though, I’m proud that this portfolio was hand-coded from scratch with a somewhat-working responsive design. As bad as it seemed, this portfolio still landed me my first design internship! I guess it served its purpose!

Portfolio 2013 | A fresh grad’s attempt to be “creative”

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2013 was the time when I just finished my internship and was about to graduate from grad school. I was eager to revamp the portfolio site to be job-hunting ready. Although I had more design projects accumulated, they were still mostly incomplete school work that was hard to shine on its own, so I felt like using a typical boxy portfolio layout just wouldn’t be enough to stand out. I was really inspired by architecture and interior design aesthetics at that time, so I brought in a sense of space with parallax effects and natural material pattern into the portfolio design. There was also some influence from the ultra-thin typography that was trendy due to the release of the new iOS 7 style guide. As you can see, I went overboard and tried way too hard. 😅

Due to the complex structure of the site, everything was pretty much hard-coded with compromised usability and very little room to expand the content. Now looking at it again, this is definitely a site that “stands out,” but probably not in a good way. Regardless, this site did land me on my very first full-time UX design position in a design agency. I guess it also served its purpose!

Portfolio 2016 | A portfolio that started to feel “professional”

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Here came to the very first site that I felt a bit more comfortable having my name on it — a site that finally started to feel “professional.” I think two factors contributed to this:

First, after three years of agency work experience, my eye towards design had evolved quite a bit. The interaction design pattern in the industry had also reached its maturity that a minimal visual style was well accepted by the consumers. I started appreciating the subtlety and detail in a seemingly simple design. I also started valuing styles that could be boring at first glance but are more timeless.

Second, by having a couple more design pieces from the real world, I felt less urge to over-design the site and could just have a simple structure to let the work shine on its own, which is exactly what a “portfolio” site is supposed to be for. I still decided to hand-code the site so I could have full control over the design (mainly to experiment with motion graphics!), but I made an effort to keep the structure simple and mobile friendly.

Overall, I was pretty happy with the result. This portfolio site landed me my very first in-house design job in a brand-name company. It had accomplished its purpose for sure!

Portfolio 2023 | Being true to myself

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Fast forward to 2023, after another 6+ years working in-house, I felt the need to update my online portfolio again. However, this time around, it’s not really for a purpose of landing on specific positions, but more for self-fulfillment.

Something I realized in the past years was — the more experiences I accumulated on my resume, the less important it is to have an up-to-date “online” portfolio (at least for the purpose of getting an in-house design position). An easy accessible online presence like a LinkedIn profile is often good enough. There are many other factors when it comes to getting a job offer. Having internal referrals, delivering a strong portfolio presentation onsite, practicing whiteboard challenges, etc. are far more important than having a great online portfolio (that no one reads😅). Looking back the past several years, none of the three positions I landed recently were due to my online portfolio. So before I knew it, the site has been sitting quietly untouched since 2016 as my life moved on.

Then…why exactly am I updating the site again? Well, I think the real answer is — I really enjoy design! After all, a portfolio site is one of the very few projects in which I get to own every single decision end-to-end. I really enjoy the process of iterate on a design and deliver the vision to my heart’s content. As I started to dabble in illustration in recent years, the 2016 site started to feel a bit too generic and a lack of personality. I want a site that could highlight not only my UX work, but also visual work that I truly enjoy. Also, this time around, I want a site with a blog capability, so that I could have a place to properly document my writings (that doesn’t quite exist yet except for this post. 😄) I ended up creating a custom theme in WordPress so that the content could be easily updated independently from the web design.

Closing thought

Overall, I think updating my portfolio site every so often is a good forcing function for me to reflect on my past growth (and feel slightly better about my past sweat on projects that were never made it to the real world.) I hope with this new site, I could develop a cadence of regular update as I continue my lifelong journey as a designer into the next decade!