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How to Project Manage Your Own UX Portfolio
5 steps to help you stop pushing pixels and start telling a story
This cotton candy video making the rounds on Twitter immediately reminded me of my portfolio:
Me: Stuffing hours and hours of work, sweat, and tears into case studies
My Portfolio: Nothing to see here, just a tepid pool of gray sugar water
Building a portfolio is hard for two reasons. First, we’re too close to our own work to look at it with enough perspective, meaning that it’s easy to think every sketch is important. This means we have a hard time teasing out a concise, coherent story and choosing the most relevant artifacts to tell that story. We end up packing a case study so full of images and anecdotes that a recruiter’s eyes glaze over before they even get to the “How might we…” statement.
The second reason it’s hard is that we are often our own harshest critics. We see all the flaws in every screen and process photo, and spend a ton of time fine-tuning every single pixel. This means we sink…
