NDAs and portfolios

This topic is mentioned in a few posts here, but in specific cases. I was curious what folks think / do in a general way regarding this.

My portfolio is mostly UX so it’s not as bad as it could be for ID projects, but I really want to show of the visual things I worked on, mostly storyboards and wireframes. These projects are a ways out… one is probably 5-10 years from market (if it even goes that way) and the other is at least a year off.

There are some things I can show, like whiteboard stuff and way zoomed out sketch pages, but I feel like it’s going to look like I didn’t do much.

Any general strategies for dealing with this? Anyone ever do a disclaimer that it’s NDA censored so at least the reviewer knows there is more there?

I was lucky leaving my internship at an ID consultancy, I had to write a work term report for my university and had to run it by them to make sure everything was properly scrubbed. I just used the same images in my portfolio.

I wouldn’t put a disclaimer, but rather don’t try too hard to make it look uncensored. If they see black bars and blurs in the image, they’ll get the idea. Hopefully, whoever’s reviewing your portfolio also has enough experience to recognize what type of background work went into what you’re able to show.

For my internship after that one, I own all the IP :wink:

This is actually an important question and it is often asked.

Some time ago a court ruled on this issue, I forget jurisdiction in North America, regarding personal interview disclosure of information pertinent to a patent application. The ruling was that a job interview does not imply public disclosure, a degree of privacy is expected due to the reasonable likelihood of admitting personal information. I think this makes perfect sense, an interview is conducted in private and private information is exchanged between both parties.

In earlier days’ job interviews I have shown work I did that morning in an afternoon interview. I prefaced it with some caveat: new work, unreleased work. Also, common sense must prevail: don’t show unreleased work if you are interviewing with a competitor or similar.

I think Pier’s advice is solid. Don’t do damage (don’t expose IP, I’ve shown things and when the interviewer asked what it did or how it was made I’ve simply said I can’t say at this time), don’t be careless (no leave behinds), but also don’t ask interviewers to sign and NDA because they won’t.