Hey and welcome back to a new week!

I look through a lot of portfolios through portfolio-showcase and talent-network submissions. And while 30 seconds is not enough for a complete evaluation, it is often enough to decide whether I want to keep looking.

This week, I’m going deeper into what happens during that crucial first scan.

In this issue:

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We recently talked about how hiring managers actually scan your portfolio.

Most people do not read it from top to bottom. They scan, pattern-match, and decide where their attention should go next. The first few seconds do a lot more work than most designers realise.

This week, I want to go deeper into what happens during that first scan.

I do this constantly through portfolio-showcase & talent network submissions. I am not conducting a complete evaluation in 30 seconds. I am deciding whether I want to keep looking.

Sometimes the answer is no before I have opened a single case study.

That may sound harsh. It is also how attention works when someone has a large pile of portfolios and limited time. A hiring manager does not need to prove that your work is bad before moving on. They only need enough doubt to prioritise someone else. And believe me that I'm still more generous than many hiring managers when I'm reviewing.

These are five concrete signals that create that doubt for me.

Let me be precise here: I am talking about the main link you send as your portfolio.

Behance can still be useful for discovery and freelance work. Notion is useful for documentation. Figma prototypes can be ok inside a case study.

None of those things automatically makes them a good product design portfolio though.

Behance is built around visual projects. It struggles to communicate product design work as a connected body of evidence: who you are, which projects matter most, and how everything fits together. Everything being a static image is not doing your work justice in 2026.

Notion usually feels like a document. Even a well-organised Notion page gives you limited control over hierarchy, presentation, interaction, and personality.

A Figma prototype gives you more visual freedom, but it rarely feels like a real website. Load times can be poor, navigation can feel strange, and responsive behaviour is difficult. It still feels like a simulation.

That weakens the presentation before I have even judged the work. And the presentation does count.

In 2026, there are fewer reasons to take that chance. Framer and vibe-coding are approachable. You can make something personal without having to become an engineer.

You do not need an expensive custom domain either. A clean Framer or Vercel URL is not the same thing as sending someone to a loose Behance project or Figma prototype. The important part is that the experience feels intentional, accessible, and like it belongs to you.

If you prefer designing the site in Figma first, use Figma MCP with Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, or another coding tool to turn it into a real web experience. I covered that workflow in How to Turn a Figma Design Into a Live Prototype With AI Coding Tools.

A proper website also gives you basic analytics. You can see whether people open the work, where they drop off, and which applications bring traffic. That is difficult when your “portfolio” is only a link to somebody else’s workspace or content platform.

The standard is not “build the most impressive portfolio website on the internet.”

It is: show enough care to create a real home for your work.

I believe you.

You probably would not spend months building projects, learning tools, and applying for difficult jobs if you were not passionate about design.

But the statement tells me almost nothing about you.

The same applies to lines like:

None of those things is bad. They are simply too generic to help me remember you. And they are also kinda...expected?

As a junior, you do not need to position yourself as the world’s leading B2B fintech designer. Nobody reasonable expects you to lock your career into one niche.

You can still say something more meaningful.

Maybe you are strongest in visual and interaction design, enjoy making complicated tools easier to understand, bring experience from another industry, or move comfortably between design and code.

That gives me somewhere to place you.

Finding that line can take effort because it requires looking across your work rather than inventing a slogan. Our article on positioning yourself for the right roles goes much deeper into that process.

There is one more rule: the work needs to support the claim.

If your hero says you design complex systems, I should find complexity in the projects. If you say you blend design and engineering, I should find built work or technical evidence. If you position yourself around interaction design, the portfolio should not consist entirely of static screens.

Your hero does not need to explain everything. It needs to give the rest of the portfolio a useful frame.

This one is subjective, so it needs some nuance.

I am not saying every portfolio must copy the same design trends. I do not want 200 identical websites with the same giant sans-serif heading, bento grid, and floating gradient orb.

Intentional retro design can be great. Early-internet aesthetics or old operating-system references can feel fresh when they are reinterpreted deliberately.

That is different from a portfolio that accidentally feels like a corporate marketing website from 2015.

You can usually feel the difference in the details:

The problem is not that something looks ten years old. The problem is that it suggests your visual references and execution stopped there too.

Look at current websites and products. Look at the strongest portfolios in the Open Doors showcase. Notice typography, spacing, motion, responsive behaviour, and how information is paced. Do not copy them blindly. Update your frame of reference.

Fresh does not mean trendy.

It means the design feels considered now.

I have not opened the case study yet. I am looking at the project card on your homepage.

The mockup is awkwardly cropped. The phone is stretched. A screen is squeezed into the wrong aspect ratio. The asset is blurry. The interface is so small that I cannot make anything out. The alignment is slightly off in a way that makes the whole thing feel rushed.

That preview is a sample of the quality I should expect inside.

If the sample already looks careless, I become much less motivated to click.

This is not about demanding senior-level craft from somebody applying for their first role. Juniors are still learning. I do not expect you to raise the quality bar of an experienced design organisation on day one.

I do expect to see that you want to raise it.

That means caring about the final ten percent: exporting a sharp asset, checking the crop, using a mockup that fits the work, reviewing spacing, making sure the mobile layout works, and asking whether the preview actually makes the project look desirable.

The market is competitive. Other early-career designers have put that level of care into the same details. Is that fair? Maybe not. I did not create that market, but pretending the comparison is not happening will not help you navigate it.

The good news is that this is fixable. You may not need a new project. You may need one focused pass where you treat the presentation itself as design work.

Multidisciplinary work is not the enemy.

Open Doors has featured excellent designers who combine product design with branding, motion, 3D, code, or other disciplines. That range can make somebody more interesting.

The problem is a lack of hierarchy.

If you apply for a digital product design role and your homepage leads with industrial design, physical products, experimental 3D work, and one small UX project at the bottom, I have to work too hard to find the evidence I need.

If I see one digital product design case study followed by work from separate industries, I often do not have enough relevant material to judge. I may not be qualified to evaluate that work, and it may not be useful to the audience I review for.

A hiring manager has an even narrower question: does this person have enough evidence for this role?

You do not have to delete the rest of your work. Put it into perspective.

Lead with the discipline you want to be hired for. Give relevant projects the strongest placement. Move secondary work into an archive, playground, or clearly labelled section. Explain how an adjacent skill strengthens your product work when the connection is real.

If you only have one relevant project, consider whether you need another before applying heavily. One outstanding product design project can sometimes carry a portfolio, especially when the adjacent work is exceptional. But that is a high bar and an exception—not a safe default.

Range becomes valuable once I understand the core.

Without that core, range often looks like uncertainty.

None of these signals proves that somebody is a bad designer.

A talented designer can have a generic hero. A thoughtful case study can sit behind a terrible mockup. Strong work can be trapped in Notion because the person has not had time to build a proper site yet.

But a reviewer cannot evaluate the invisible version of your portfolio. They can only evaluate what you put in front of them.

That is why the first scan matters so much.

Before rewriting every case study, check the surface:

You do not need to become a different designer overnight.

You need to stop giving people easy reasons to leave before they see what you can actually do.

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Yash Fataniya is an India-based multidisciplinary product designer currently working with SuperKalam, a Y Combinator W23 company. He is also open to work.

His portfolio stands apart from many I have featured over recent months.

Product design sits at its center, supported by motion, branding, development, visual exploration, and product thinking. Those skills feel connected rather than presented as separate services.

That balance makes Yash well suited to startup environments, where designers frequently move between product flows, landing pages, brand work, launch assets, and prototypes.

He also knows how to present the result.

Every project receives its own visual treatment. Motion appears throughout the site. Testimonials connect his craft to business outcomes. Smaller interactions show that he has considered how someone should experience the portfolio.

Two parts of this deserve a closer look.

That’s it for this week—thanks so much for the support! ♥️

Do you want your own portfolio reviewed in-depth with a 30-minute advice-packed video portfolio review? Look no more. I do offer these as an async service you can book directly with me here.

Keep kicking doors open and see you next week!
- Florian