Hey and welcome back to a new week!

Small reminder that we are halfway through June and if you plan to participate in the Open Doors x Framer Student Challenge you still have about two weeks to submit your interaction!

In this issue:

• Learn How Your Portfolio Is Actually Being Read: Most people do not read portfolios slowly. They scan for fit, proof, taste, and reasons to keep going. Here is how to design for that.

• Rhea’s Portfolio: An amazing example of how to position yourself strongly for B2B / Enterprise design roles.

Thank you for reading!

📣 LAST CALL FOR THE OPEN DOORS X FRAMER STUDENT CHALLENGE

June is almost over and so is the Open Doors x Framer Student Challenge!

If you are keen on winning amazing prizes by Framer (and obviously claim the fame) or just want to level up your interaction design skills you still have the chance to!

Follow the theme of Moments and craft something impressive.

Submit your interaction made in Framer until June 30 at midnight to be considered!

P.S: Framer just had their biggest release ever with Framer 3.0 enabling you to craft interactions way better than ever before so if you have been waiting for a sign, this is it!

How Hiring Managers Actually Scan Your Portfolio in 2026 👀

I think one of the biggest mistakes designers make with their portfolio is assuming people will experience it the way they built it.

They imagine someone opening the site, reading the hero, clicking the first project, carefully going through the process, noticing the research, admiring the decisions, maybe opening the About page, and then forming a thoughtful opinion.

That can happen, but it is not the default. Most of the time, your portfolio is being scanned under pressure. Someone has too many tabs open, too many candidates to review, and too little context. Maybe they are a recruiter trying to understand if you roughly fit the role. Maybe they are a design manager trying to see if your work has enough depth. Either way, they are probably not reading your portfolio like an essay.

They are pattern-matching.

They are trying to answer a few simple questions quickly:

• Do I understand what kind of designer this person is?

• Does the work match the role?

• Does the visual quality feel strong enough?

• Can I trust the thinking behind the work?

• Is there enough proof here to justify an interview?

That is the lens I would use when improving a portfolio right now. Not "how do I make this beautiful?" Not "how do I include everything I did?" But: how do I help the right person understand my fit quickly?

Because that is much closer to how portfolios are actually reviewed.

Before They Even Click

The review starts before someone opens your portfolio. It starts with the link.

And this is still one of those painfully simple things that tells people more than you think. If you are applying for product design or UX roles and your main portfolio link is Behance, Dribbble, a messy Notion page, or a half-finished PDF, that creates friction immediately.

Not because those platforms are evil. They are fine for certain types of work. But for product design, people expect to see case studies, context, flows, decisions, tradeoffs, constraints, and outcomes. They expect the work to live somewhere that feels intentional.

Behance often signals the opposite. It usually says: here are some visuals. It does not say: here is how I think.

That matters, especially now, because there are fewer reasons than ever to have no proper portfolio surface. You can build something simple in Framer. You can build something in Webflow. You can vibe code a clean portfolio with tools like Lovable, Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or whatever you enjoy using.

The tool itself is not the point. The point is that your portfolio should feel like a deliberate product, not a folder where your work happens to live. If someone has to fight the format before they can understand the work, you already made the review harder.

And in a market like this, harder usually means closed tab.

A Word on Domains

I sometimes see people call out folks that use the Framer domain on the free plan or a Vercel domain. I personally think this is NOT the same as serving a Behance link and I empathize with the fact that many can’t afford a custom domain or a paid plan. If you are an enrolled student and use Framer you can get the Basic plan which includes the ability to connect a custom domain for free. Aside from that I wouldn’t stress about this though.

The First Scan

Once the portfolio opens, the first judgment is usually visual.

That sounds shallow, but it is not. You are applying for design roles. The way your own work is presented is part of the work.

People can feel quality very quickly. They might not stop and say, "the type scale lacks rhythm and the spacing system is inconsistent," but they will feel that something is off. And when something feels off in your portfolio, it makes people wonder what else might be off in your work.

This does not mean your site needs to be wildly creative. In fact, a lot of junior portfolios would improve immediately if they became more boring in the right ways: better typography, cleaner spacing, less decoration, stronger screenshots, and fewer competing effects.

The goal is not to impress people with a fancy homepage. The goal is to make them trust your eye.

This is also why I would be careful with overly AI-looking visuals, generic 3D blobs, endless gradients, and portfolio templates that look impressive for five seconds but do not actually support the work. Hiring managers are getting better at spotting surface-level polish.

The question is not whether the portfolio looks trendy. The question is whether this person seems in control of the experience.

If the answer is yes, people keep going.

The Hero Section

The hero section has one job: help people understand what kind of designer you are.

That is it. Not your entire life story. Not a poetic line about pixels and empathy. Not "I craft meaningful experiences for humans." Please no.

Your hero should give people enough context to place you. Are you strongest in product design? Do you lean visual? Do you work well with technical teams? Are you interested in complex B2B tools? Do you care about interaction design? Do you bring research depth? Do you have experience in healthcare, fintech, education, AI products, enterprise tools, or consumer apps?

This is not about stuffing your hero with keywords until it sounds like LinkedIn soup. It is about making your positioning clear enough that someone can remember it.

Recruiters often scan for fit. They want to know whether your profile roughly matches the role. Hiring managers scan for judgment. They want to know whether the way you describe yourself matches the work underneath.

That second part is important. If your hero says you are a product designer focused on complex systems, but your work is mostly pretty mobile concepts with no real complexity, there is a mismatch. If your hero says you blend design and engineering, but there is no built work, no prototypes, no code, no systems thinking, and no technical evidence anywhere, there is a mismatch.

If your hero says you are AI-native, but the portfolio never shows how AI changed your workflow or output, there is also a mismatch.

And mismatches are where trust starts leaking.

So make the hero specific, but make sure the rest of the portfolio can cash the check.

The Work Preview

Before someone opens a case study, they scan the project cards. This is where a lot of portfolios lose people.

The work might be decent, but the preview does not create enough reason to click. You often see project cards with titles like "Mobile App Redesign," "Capstone Project," "PayPal Internship," or "UX Case Study." Technically, those are titles, but they do not tell me much.

They do not tell me the problem. They do not tell me the context. They do not tell me why the project mattered. They do not help me understand whether it is relevant to the role.

A stronger preview gives people a reason to care. Instead of "Payment App Redesign," something closer to "Reducing friction in shared payments for groups splitting expenses" immediately creates more context. Instead of "Dashboard Redesign," try something like "Helping operations teams identify delivery delays before customers complain."

Even if the project is fictional, you can still frame it around a believable problem. That is the shift. You are not presenting assignments. You are presenting design problems.

The image matters too. One strong preview is usually better than a chaotic collage of every screen you designed. Show enough to communicate the product, the quality, and the type of work. If motion helps, use it. A short GIF or video can be great. But do not turn the entire homepage into ten animations fighting each other.

The work preview should make scanning easier, not louder.

The Case Study

If someone opens a case study, they are giving you attention. Do not waste it on a generic process template.

This is still one of the most common problems I see. Research. Define. Ideate. Prototype. Test. Conclusion.

There is nothing wrong with those steps in real work. The problem is that as section titles, they usually say nothing. They turn the case study into a school report, and hiring managers are not trying to check whether you know the double diamond exists. They are trying to understand how you think.

So the case study should answer more useful questions:

• What was the actual problem?

• What made it difficult?

• What options did you consider?

• Where did you change your mind?

• What tradeoffs did you make?

• What improved because of your decisions?

• What would you do differently now?

That is where the interesting part lives. Especially for juniors, I would rather read one honest section about a real tradeoff than six polished paragraphs pretending the process was perfect.

Do not just show that you did research. Show what the research changed. Do not just show personas. Show what you learned about behavior, constraints, motivation, or risk. Do not just show final screens. Show why the solution became that shape.

And if you used AI, this is where it can actually become interesting. Not as a label, but as evidence. Did it help you explore interaction patterns faster? Build a working prototype? Test copy variations? Simulate data states? Move from design into implementation?

Show that.

The market does not need more designers writing "AI-native" in their bio. It needs designers who can show how new tools changed the quality, speed, or ambition of their work.

That is a much stronger signal.

The About Page

The About page usually gets clicked later. Not always, but often.

And I think people underestimate what that means. If someone opens your About page after looking at your work, they are probably already interested. Now they want to understand the person behind it.

This is where a lot of designers either say too little or write something that sounds like it was assembled from every portfolio About page ever made.

You do not need to be quirky. You do not need to overshare. You do not need to turn your personality into a brand campaign. But you should feel like a real person.

A photo helps. A few specific details help. A short story about how you got into design can help. Your background can help, especially if it explains why your work has a certain shape.

If you come from engineering, education, psychology, architecture, marketing, customer support, fine arts, whatever it is, connect the dots. The About page is not just decoration. It can make your profile more memorable.

And in a stack of portfolios that all start to blur together, memorable matters.

The Hidden Review: Consistency

Hiring teams do not only review the portfolio in isolation. They compare it against everything else: your CV, your LinkedIn, your application answers, your email, your public work, your GitHub, your Framer remix, or any experiments you link to.

Your positioning across all of these should feel like one person.

If your CV says product designer, your LinkedIn says UX/UI designer, your portfolio says multidisciplinary creative, and your projects mostly look like branding work, people have to do too much interpretation.

And when people have to do too much interpretation, they usually choose the candidate who made the fit easier to understand.

This is why clarity beats broadness for most juniors. Breadth is great when the quality supports it. But vague breadth usually reads as uncertainty.

So before sending your portfolio out, ask: what is the strongest story someone could tell about me after 60 seconds?

If the answer is unclear, the portfolio is unclear.

The Portfolio Might Not Be The First Door

One more thing I would keep in mind: the portfolio is not always where discovery starts.

I recently spoke with a very senior design leader at a company with a lot of credibility in the design community. The broader conversation was about how much AI is changing hiring, especially around the middle of the market. But the part I found more interesting for early-career designers was how he is finding talent now.

He told me he has been looking directly on X.

Not job boards. Not application portals. Not necessarily inbound applications. He looks at students and junior designers who post their work, their experiments, their prototypes, their interactions, and their process. When he sees someone whose work has the taste, energy, and direction he wants, he reaches out directly and invites them into the company.

That is not how every company hires, obviously. And I am not saying everyone needs to become a content creator or start posting every thought they have online. Please do not do that.

But it does say something important. If your portfolio is the only place where your work exists, you are making discovery harder than it needs to be. A portfolio is still the home base. It is where people go when they want the complete story. But public work can be the signal that gets them there in the first place

So if you are building something interesting, show a piece of it. If you are exploring an interaction, post the recording. If you are testing an AI workflow, share what changed in the output. If you made a small prototype, write a few sentences about why you made it.

The point is not to perform productivity. The point is to leave traces of your taste, curiosity, and momentum in places where people can actually discover them.

That might feel uncomfortable, but it is becoming part of the game.

Bonus: Watch What People Actually Do

Your portfolio is a product. Treat it like one.

Add basic analytics. Use Framer analytics if that is what you have. Use Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar if you want heatmaps and session recordings. Add UTM tags to different applications if you want to understand where traffic is coming from.

You do not need to become obsessed with the numbers, but you should know what is happening. Are people opening the site and leaving immediately? Are they scrolling past your first project? Are they never reaching your strongest case study? Are they spending time on your About page?

This is useful feedback. It is not perfect and it will not tell you everything, but it is better than guessing.

And honestly, a lot of designers are still guessing. They send applications, hear nothing, and then randomly change the font, rewrite the hero, move to a new platform, or rebuild the whole site from scratch.

That is not strategy. That is panic with a nice interface.

Look at the behavior first. Then improve the portfolio.

Final Thoughts

Most people will not review your portfolio slowly. They will scan it, pattern-match, and look for reasons to continue or reasons to leave.

That might sound harsh, but it is actually useful. Because once you understand the review flow, you can design for it.

You can make the first few seconds stronger. You can make your positioning clearer. You can make the work previews more specific. You can make the case studies less generic. You can remove projects that confuse the story. You can show proof instead of just claiming things.

You can make your portfolio feel like it belongs to the kind of role you actually want.

That is the real job. Not showing everything you have ever done. Not proving you followed a perfect process. Not decorating the site until it feels impressive.

The job is much simpler and much harder:

Help the right person understand why you are worth talking to. Fast.

Because the portfolio is not the final destination.

It is the door.

And the whole point is to get someone to open it.

Further Reading

• How to Write a Strong Case Study for Your Portfolio in 2026 🧠 

• The Ultimate Portfolio Guide for Product Designers in 2026 🎒 

• The Guide to Position Yourself for the Right Roles in 2026 🧭

• How to Show Off Your Work Better With Video 📹

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👀 Portfolio Showcase

Today: Rhea Mittal

Rhea Mittal’s portfolio is a bit different from some of the portfolios I’ve shown recently.

Rhea is a recent graduate from Indiana University with an MS in HCI, and her profile leans more toward enterprise software, complex B2B problems, and product work that has less obvious surface glamour than consumer-facing mobile apps.

That’s exactly why I wanted to feature it.

A lot of design students and junior designers still gravitate toward flashy, interaction-heavy, consumer-facing work. And I get it. That’s often what made many of us excited about design in the first place. But a huge share of product design jobs sit in B2B, SaaS, and enterprise software, where the problems are messy, the systems are complex, and the need for strong design is still enormous.

Rhea’s portfolio shows that this kind of work can still be presented with clarity, polish, and confidence.

It doesn’t try to become an interaction playground. It doesn’t need to. It knows what kind of designer it is presenting.

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