Build your Design Portfolio

Build your Design Portfolio

A step-by-step guide to building an awesome Design Portfolio to help you land a job.

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4 min read

When looking for UI/UX Design jobs, there's nothing more important than your portfolio. This guide will help you get started with your design portfolio in a way that you learn and grow your portfolio enough to land a job.

Let's first understand what UI and UX exactly are.

UI and UX.png

UI and UX are neither the same not are they completely different. They are interdependent on one another and hence neither one can be completely ignored. If you want to focus on one, you need to have some idea about the other. However, recently most of the available positions prefer an individual with skills in both UI and UX.

User Interface (UI) is where actual designing happens. The visual design of components the user can look at, the colours, the typography, and more. On the other hand, User Experience (UX) contributes to the research phase that comes before the actual design process. You try to understand your target users and make design decisions based on your research.

Step Zero: Don't build your Portfolio... yet!

It seems strange to tell you NOT to build your portfolio in a step-by-step guide to help you build one. But trust me, there are important things to know before you start building your portfolio.

โš ๏ธ Understand the Fundamentals

It is extremely important that you understand the fundamentals of both UI and UX Design. I'd recommend not to start building your portfolio until you've covered the design fundamentals.

๐Ÿ’ฅ BOOM! Now that you're equipped with the knowledge, let's get to building your portfolio. Your portfolio must be diverse with different platforms, different trends and reflect your skills.

Step 1: DailyUI Challenge

Your first step should be to design 1-2 page shots and publish those on Social Media. You can start the #DailyUI challenge on Twitter where you receive one design challenge every day. it not only provides you with a diverse set of design projects but grows your portfolio to 30 designs by the time you end the challenge.

Step 2: Sharpen.Design

After you're done with the DailyUI challenge or want more projects during the challenge, exploring sharpen.design is an amazing website that generates random project ideas not only for web and mobile designs but for many other design projects. You get many specific project ideas to avoid any vagueness.

Step 3: Steal

Yes, you read that right. An efficient way to improve your design skills is to try and replicate designs by other users. It helps you understand and implement the fundamentals you learned while learning new design types and trends. I wouldn't recommend publishing designs that you copy pixel for pixel, but you can design your own version of the concept if you want to publish the design.

Step 4: The Full Projects

Now that your portfolio has a lot of design shots on Dribbble, you can start focusing on building some full-size projects covering everything from UX Research to UI Design. You can share your projects on Behance since, unlike Dribbble, you can add a lot more images to convey the entire journey of your project rather than just a few screens.

Step 5: Communities

I'm not sure about other designing platforms, but you can opt to share your design projects on Figma Community for people to duplicate and contribute, it also serves as a good motivation to keep on designing and improve.

Conclusion

This is not the only way to build your portfolio, but one of the ways to build your portfolio. But this can all be boiled down into a few vague steps:

๐Ÿ‘‰ Understand the Fundamentals

๐Ÿ‘‰ Start with small 1-2 screen projects and publish on Dribbble

๐Ÿ‘‰ Steal designs to understand how other people design and learn different styles and trends

๐Ÿ‘‰ Move on to full-fledged projects covering everything from UX Research to UI Design

๐Ÿ‘‰ Publish to Communities

The End

You've reached the end of this post. If you liked this post, I'd appreciate it if you dropped a like โค๏ธ and shared this post with others to hopefully help them.

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