The Death of Design Portfolios
How Big Tech is changing the way designers show their work
Designers keep up with what’s going on in design by looking at blogs, magazines, schools, exhibitions, and portfolio sites. We know we have to maintain this habit because we are interested in promoting ourselves to get business, build our reputations, and assert ourselves as culture makers. But what happens when those interests change?
A few years ago, I started noticing a strange phenomenon: When designers I followed went to work for technology companies, their portfolios froze — no updates, no new work, nothing. In the Bay Area, where most designers were working in the tech sector, this meant that a lot of folks had ostensibly vanished from, or never really entered, the creative community. With tech’s inexorable expansion in other parts of the country, from Seattle to Austin to Washington, D.C., I see this trend accelerating, with more and more designers being swallowed up by big tech.
Why would so many prolific, proud, (sometimes annoyingly) self-promoting designers go dark? I decided it must be because they had to. They probably weren’t allowed to show the amazing work they were making in-house because they’d signed restrictive contracts locking it away from public view.
