Designer’s Dilemma: “Portfolio for Work — Work for Portfolio”

You feel ready to earn money. What now?

You just graduated from a design school or you are a self taught aspiring designer. You feel like you’re finally ready to start earning money. What now? If “creating a portfolio” is not the first thing that comes to your mind, you’ll quickly realize you definitely need a portfolio as soon as you apply to your first design job. You made your research on creating a portfolio, maybe you looked at other successful people’s portfolios. Now you need to create your portfolio but you don’t have any works to showcase on your portfolio. Wait.. Aren’t you supposed to get a project/job first to showcase any work on your portfolio? What’s up with this loop?

Clients or the company that’s going to hire you needs to see your style, how you approach to problems and your technical capabilities but when there’s no “real product” on the table, it’s hard to work on imaginary concepts. Obviously, I’m not talking about concept Dribbble shots. Real problem is that you need to create and also solve problems all by yourself.

So what can you do to break out of this loop?

Try Redesigning

Redesigning is actually a fairly popular technique among aspiring designers (especially for new starters) to populate portfolio works. Most common mistake here is doing it ineffectively.

How do you re-design a product effectively?

You shouldn’t forget that, at the end of the day, your job is to think of solutions for problems. Try to find a product with real problems. Redesign to solve those problems, present it with a case study, furthermore document your process with a blog post. Make sure the problems you solve are related to the field you’re specialized in. In short, there’s no point of rearrenging every UI element, switching the company’s main color blue with red and creating a new logo just for the sake of “re-imagining” Facebook. Of course, you can change other parts to adapt to your solution but the point is, you should know that these brands/products (especially ones as big as Facebook) have tons of decision mechanisms, tests, brand values etc. behind the scenes.

I suggest taking a closer look around you instead of reviewing complex products like Amazon/Facebook/Ebay. I got one of my first gigs by redesigning a local social media app that I used often in my daily life.