Hey and welcome back to a new week!

Last week, I wrote about choosing the projects that belong in your portfolio. This week, I want to look at what belongs inside the work itself—and what might be better left out.

Knowing when to subtract is a skill worth building early, whether you are designing a product, a portfolio, or your next side project.

In this issue:

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When you are learning design, getting better can feel like becoming able to add more things.

More sophisticated interactions. More features. More animation. More ways to show what you can do. You learn a technique, and naturally you want to find somewhere to use it.

I think one of the clearest signs of becoming a more experienced designer is knowing when to leave those things out. You can see an opportunity for another interaction and decide the page already has enough going on. You can imagine five additional features and recognise that the product would be stronger without four of them.

That takes judgment. It also takes confidence, because the thing you leave out might be something you spent a long time learning how to make.

The skill I am talking about is restraint. And I notice it in good junior portfolios just as much as I notice when it is missing.

A product can have a lot of functionality and still feel light. It can also do something quite simple and somehow make the whole experience feel exhausting.

The difference often comes down to whether the designer understands what deserves attention, what can wait, and what does not need to be there at all.

Imagine a small tool that helps people find a time to meet. Before long, there is a dashboard, a team directory, profile customisation, an activity feed, badges, and a chat feature. Each addition has a plausible explanation. Someone might find it useful. Another product has it. It would be nice if people could do this too.

But someone still opened the tool because they needed to find a time to meet. Has that become easier? Or have you built a lot of product around a task that needed very little?

Every addition asks for something. Space in the interface. Attention from the user. Time to understand it. Design and engineering effort. Maintenance. More decisions about how the new thing behaves alongside everything already there.

Sometimes that cost is worth paying. A powerful product needs capabilities. But “this could be useful” is a very low bar for deciding what belongs.

When the solution becomes extremely complicated compared with the problem, I would stop and look again. You may have found genuine complexity that needs to be handled. You may also be creating it.

In a company, you rarely control every product decision. In your own portfolio, you have much more freedom. That makes it a useful place to practise this skill, and a very visible place to demonstrate it.

I like portfolios with personality. A distinctive interaction, a playful detail, or a beautifully considered transition can make the whole experience more memorable. But those things need somewhere to land.

If the cursor has an effect, the background is moving, every card animates, the headings reveal themselves, and the navigation is doing something clever too, what am I supposed to look at?

You may have made each piece well. The problem is what happens when they are all asking for attention together.

A strong portfolio gives those moments a hierarchy. Maybe the homepage is expressive, but the case study settles down so I can follow the work. Maybe the project cards have one lovely interaction, while the navigation stays straightforward. Maybe an animation helps explain a product decision, and everything around it gives that explanation room.

Restraint is knowing where the interaction belongs and where the experience is already doing its job.

An experienced designer will often notice this quickly. They can see when someone has control over the composition, and when someone is still trying to demonstrate every capability at once. That impression comes through before they have read your process.

At this point, you might be thinking: fine, you like minimalism. I like maximalism. That is my style.

Fair enough. But restraint is not a preference for empty space, neutral colours, and two type sizes.

You can make something visually dense, colourful, layered, and expressive while still making it clear what matters. A maximalist surface can have strong hierarchy. It can guide attention deliberately. It can give the main action enough presence that nobody has to search for it.

That is often harder to pull off because there are more relationships to manage. You have to control how the type, imagery, colour, motion, and content work together. Some elements can be loud because other elements support them. A busy composition can still have a clear point of entry.

What I would push back on is using maximalism as an explanation for everything competing all the time.

You should be able to tell me what I am meant to notice first, what I should do next, and how the design helps me get there. That applies whether the page has three elements or thirty.

The more experienced you become, the more you tend to notice that distinction. You can admire how much is happening while also seeing how carefully it has been controlled.

The same habit matters inside your case studies, especially when you own the brief.

It is tempting to make a fictional project feel substantial by giving it more features. You start with one useful idea and eventually design an entire platform around it. Now you have a lot of screens, but the central experience still needs work.

I would much rather see you resolve one meaningful task properly. Make it clear, useful, and satisfying. Think through the important states. Use realistic content. Get the interaction right.

If you are designing a way to compare rental apartments, for example, you can spend your effort making the comparison genuinely useful. Which information matters? How do people compare different trade-offs? What helps someone narrow the choice?

You do not automatically need messaging, a social layer, or a landlord dashboard to make that project convincing.

Choosing a smaller scope does not mean avoiding depth. It gives you room to go deeper into the part that matters. You can explain why you concentrated there, what you left out, and what would need to be true before you expanded it.

That tells me something about how you make decisions. A long list of features mainly tells me how much you decided to take on.

Inside a company, this gets more complicated because other people have a say. A stakeholder wants another option. Sales has a request. A founder saw something in another product. Your PM has a deadline and several competing priorities.

Some requests will be well founded. They may serve a customer need or business requirement you have not understood yet. Others will be much harder to connect to the purpose of the product.

The moment I would pay attention to is: “Wouldn't it be nice if it could also do this?”

Maybe it would. Before designing it, ask a few questions:

You are trying to understand the request well enough to make a good decision. A good PM will often share that instinct, even if you disagree about the answer.

Sometimes the useful contribution is proposing a smaller version. Sometimes it is combining two options that do almost the same thing. Sometimes it is questioning whether an old feature should still exist.

Be careful with that last one. Low usage can be a reason to investigate, but a feature used infrequently might still be critical to the people who need it. Before suggesting that it goes away, understand who relies on it, what depends on it, and what happens to those people afterward.

Subtraction deserves the same care as addition. Moving complexity somewhere users cannot find it, or removing something they genuinely need, does not make the product better.

And yes, there will be politics. You will sometimes add things because someone with more authority has decided that you will. You may understand the trade-off perfectly and still be unable to change the outcome.

That does not make the judgment useless. Recognising the cost, explaining it clearly, and offering a better alternative are skills you can build before you have the influence to get your way.

You do not need to wait for a senior title to practise this. Take one thing you already control: your portfolio homepage, a fictional project, or a small tool you are building.

Write down the main thing someone should be able to understand or do there. Then look at everything competing with it.

What happens if you remove one interaction? Combine two sections? Drop a feature? Make a secondary action less prominent? Try a stripped-back version before deciding whether the original was stronger.

You do not have to keep every cut. Comparing the versions is part of the exercise. Did the experience become clearer? Did it lose something useful? Did it become generic because you removed the one detail that gave it character?

You are learning what each element contributes, so you can make those choices deliberately.

I think this is a big part of becoming more senior. You get better at seeing the whole experience, including the cost of all the individually reasonable things inside it. You become more comfortable saying that the product already does enough, or that one small part deserves far more attention than the next feature on the list.

Making something feel light yet powerful is difficult. It requires knowing what should be there, what should stay in the background, and what should go.

The earlier you build that muscle, the stronger your work becomes.

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Ready to transform artificial intelligence from a buzzword into your personal revenue generator

HubSpot’s groundbreaking guide "200+ AI-Powered Income Ideas" is your gateway to financial innovation in the digital age.

Inside you'll discover:

Download your guide today and unlock a future where artificial intelligence powers your success. Your next income stream is waiting.

Get Your Guide

Anika Mantripragada is a designer at USC whose portfolio gets into the substance of working with AI.

She has adapted an existing design system for AI-generated output and built an iOS app to solve a problem she encountered herself. Those projects give her technical interests weight beyond the introduction.

Her portfolio also experiments with small interactive demonstrations that help explain the work. Let’s look at why those things stood out, and where clearer presentation and a more careful finish could help her get more from them.

Let’s have a deeper look into what makes it work so well!

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