Brutal honesty appreciated!

Website is nice and professional. You do a good job of explaining your final products, nice craftsmanship, and you have experiences and internships. However I feel you are missing two things, process and identity.

When I’m involved in hiring someone all I care about is process. I want to see the problem or brief, often supported with research and then see all the options you came up with, shown in sketches, you could support this with mockups if you like. THIS is the most important part of your portfolio if you are a younger designer. I want to see all your ideas and designs, including the bad ones, and how you moved from one idea to the next. Why you stopped one proposal and moved to the next, how you refined the final design into the super nice pictures you have already on your website. I care less about the final design and more about how you got there. Every job I’ve gotten managers have wanted the same. They don’t even look at final models, just the ideation. Because in the end, you are hired for you ideation and process as a junior and mid level designer.

Look at your egghop project. It’s a great idea, and nice final presentation. But I have no idea how you arrived to your final design. I want see 4+ pages of sketch ideas and process.

Identity is something I look for in portfolios, and it is a bit intangible. Basically, I want to see who you are, what your are good at and what you care about. I want to work with people who “own their shit” so to speak. What do you want to do? housewares? crafty things? Cars? Bikes? Show me. What are you good at? show me.

I kind of get a feeling of your identity in the website, a crafty vibe with focus on execution. Maybe that’s true? But that identity wouldn’t appeal to in house design studios and consultancies. That identity would appeal to little design studios turning out specific products, like https://building--block.com/

So if you want to work at traditional ID studios or in-house design studios doing products, make sure your identity aligns with what they want. Or on the other hand, if your identity, and what you want to do is more this crafty, handmade things, apply to places that create those products. But either place is going to want to see your process.


My thoughts, hope it helps