Hey and welcome back to a new week!

In this issue:

• The Era Of The Bootcamp Case Study Is Over: Process still matters, but showing is worth way more than telling in most cases. Read on to learn how to navigate that in your portfolio.

• Want To Kickstart Your Portfolio With Me?: I’m running a Framer workshop very soon to get you going! Read on to get a discount too!

• Caleb’s Portfolio: How he went from 0 interviews to 9 within a day after posting his portfolio.

Thank you for reading!

👀 LEARN FRAMER WITH ME

Build & Launch Your Portfolio Page in Framer with Me!

In this hands-on workshop, you'll go from blank canvas to a live, publishable portfolio page built on real best practices, in real time.

​You’ll structure, design, refine, and publish a real portfolio page using Framer’s core capabilities and built-in Workshop component.

​By the end, you won’t just understand Framer better, but you’ll have a live, expandable portfolio foundation you can keep building on.

​What You’ll Learn:

• ​How to structure a strong portfolio page directly in Framer

• ​Core Framer fundamentals: layout, hierarchy, components

• ​How to create reusable components for speed and consistency

• ​How to use Framer’s Workshop to build custom animated or complex elements with no coding required

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Design Case Studies Are Changing: More Showing, Less Telling 🤐

Last year I wrote a guide on how to write strong case studies for your portfolio. Most of the advice in that piece still holds up: give context, clarify your role, make outcomes visible, structure things so they’re easy to skim, and don’t overwhelm people with endless grids of screens.

But there’s an important caveat now.

That advice only really applies if you are still writing traditional case studies.

And increasingly, that’s not the only option anymore.

Recently, Tommy Geoco shared a post about a company running a hiring program where applicants didn’t submit portfolios at all. Instead, they submitted an AI system they built.

That raises a very fair question.

If designers can now build actual tools, features, and systems much more easily than before, why are portfolios still so heavily focused on describing a process rather than showing the outcome?

So the real question isn’t just “how do I write a better case study?”

The more interesting question is whether it even needs to be a case study anymore.

The Builder vs the Storyteller

Traditional case studies assume one role: you are the designer explaining how something was designed.

You walk the reader through research, sketches, iterations, testing, and final UI. It’s a narrative about decisions and trade-offs.

That format still works, and when it’s done well it’s very effective. The portfolio of Lana Farkas is a great example. Her case studies are still written and structured, but they don’t drown you in text. The writing that is there actually feels worth reading, and the visuals support the story rather than repeating it.

But there is another role that is becoming more common now.

The builder.

If you design and build something yourself — even something small — the story changes. Instead of describing a design process, you’re presenting something you actually created. The emphasis shifts from explaining how you designed something to showing what you built and why it exists.

The portfolio by Michelle Liu illustrates this nicely. She built her portfolio herself and embedded some of the playful interactions she created directly into it. When you open the page, you don’t just read about an idea. You can try it.

They’re not full products. They’re smaller interactions and features. But they’re real, and that makes a big difference.

Showing Instead of Explaining

For a long time, portfolios relied heavily on explanation because that was the only thing designers could realistically provide. You showed static screens, maybe a prototype recording, and explained the thinking behind them.

Now you can often show the actual thing.

You can build small tools, micro-products, or interactive features and embed them directly into your portfolio. Instead of describing how something might work, you can simply let people use it.

That’s where the idea of more showing, less telling becomes powerful.

Storytelling still matters. But the balance shifts.

The Tools That Make This Possible

What really changed over the last year is that building things became much easier.

There isn’t a single tool you have to use, but there are several ways to approach this.

If you want to go deeper technically, tools like Claude Code or Cursor make it possible to build real functionality very quickly. A lot of the hype right now is around Claude Code in particular, and honestly, some of that hype is justified. It’s extremely powerful, especially if you’re a designer who wants to prototype actual product ideas.

That said, if you’ve never touched code before, it can feel intimidating at first. There is a learning curve. But it’s one that flattens surprisingly quickly once you start experimenting.

If you want something lower-threshold, Lovable is another option. Nearly the entirety of Open Doors was built with Lovable, with only a few small exceptions. You can absolutely build nice shit with it without going very deep into code at all.

And you don’t even have to jump straight into vibe coding if that feels like too much.

Tools like Framer are still incredibly powerful for experimentation. Framer in particular is very supportive of students and early-career designers experimenting with their tool. You can build genuinely interesting interactions and small features there.

If you build something cool — a component, an interaction, a small tool — you can simply embed it into your portfolio and let people try it directly.

And that alone can make your portfolio feel very different from the typical grid of screenshots.

What feels increasingly outdated, on the other hand, are things like endless Figma prototypes or static redesigns presented as if they were finished products. Even a well-executed one can feel like it comes from a pre-AI era now.

That doesn’t mean tools determine success. They don’t. But the signals they send are starting to matter.

The Decision Many Juniors Are Facing Right Now

If you’re building a portfolio today and you don’t yet have professional projects, you’re probably facing a choice.

Do you create a traditional case study — the kind many bootcamps encouraged a few years ago — where you redesign an existing product and walk through research, wireframes, and final UI?

Or do you sit down with modern tools and actually build something?

Maybe it’s not huge. Maybe it’s a small product idea or a useful little feature. But it’s real. People can interact with it. You can test it. And you can show it directly instead of just talking about it.

That’s the decision you’re facing right now.

Personally, I would almost always lean toward the second option.

Because it sends a stronger signal.

Showing Your Work in Public

Another shift that’s happening alongside this is how designers share their work.

I recently spoke with Emmi Wu about this, and she mentioned that a lot of the attention around her work didn’t actually come from sending traditional applications. It came from posting the things she built online.

That’s something we’ve seen repeatedly over the past few years. Someone builds an interesting interaction, a clever tool, or a thoughtful experiment and shares it on X or LinkedIn. Sometimes it spreads widely. Sometimes it barely moves at all.

And that uncertainty can be frustrating.

You never really know whether something didn’t resonate because it wasn’t strong enough or simply because the algorithm didn’t pick it up.

But I would still encourage people — especially juniors — to do it.

For one thing, it increases the chances that the right people see your work. Even a single post can travel much further than a portfolio page nobody visits.

More importantly, sharing your work publicly changes how you look at it. Once something is out there, you tend to reflect on it more critically. You notice things you would have missed otherwise. Sometimes someone else jumps in with feedback that helps you see something differently.

That process alone can be incredibly valuable.

Case Studies Aren’t Disappearing — They’re Evolving

I don’t think case studies are going away.

The fundamentals still matter when you use them: clear context, visible outcomes, structured storytelling, and visuals that actually explain something. And it’s still important to remember that hiring managers skim these things. They’re looking for clarity, not essays.

But the format is evolving.

Where portfolios once relied almost entirely on written case studies, designers now have more ways to show their thinking. They can build things. They can embed interactions. They can document experiments. They can share work publicly and let it circulate.

Right now we’re in a phase where people are still figuring out what works best.

Which makes it a particularly good moment to experiment.

Because when the rules are still forming, interesting work tends to stand out much more easily.

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👀 Portfolio Showcase

Today: Caleb Wu

Sometimes a portfolio shows up in your feed and you immediately understand why it’s getting attention.

That’s exactly what happened with Caleb.

He posted his portfolio on LinkedIn recently and shared that this is his fifth iteration. The previous versions didn’t land interviews. This one did. Within a single day of posting it, he reported:

• Nine interview opportunities

• Three from top-tier companies in NYC and San Francisco

• Four from early-stage startups

• Two contract opportunities

The post itself exploded: nearly 2,000 likes and over 150 comments.

This doesn’t happen by accident.

And while the internet loves to frame moments like this as overnight success, the reality is much simpler: Caleb kept iterating until the craft caught up with the ambition.

He designed the portfolio in Figma, built it with a standard web stack, and refined parts of it with modern tooling like Claude Code, Figma Make, and Rive for animation work. Whether you call that coding or vibe coding doesn’t really matter — the point is that he used the tools intelligently.

More importantly: he cared about the details.

And when you look at the portfolio itself, that becomes obvious very quickly.

Let’s dive into why it works 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 review? Or do you require mentoring to figure out a proper strategy for your job search?

I got you!

• Book an in-depth portfolio or resume review with me

• Book a mentoring session with me

• Book a quick 15 min chat to ask a question and see if we vibe

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