Together with

Hey and welcome back to a new week!

I forgot to tell you last week but you can now go back and see the best portfolios I’ve featured on one comprehensive page with direct access to them and my reviews! This is one of the first new changes to Open Doors with lots more to come.

In this issue:

• I Keep Seeing This Mistake: The role is product design, the portfolio shows graphic design. I see this too often and in too many layers. Let’s fix it.

• The Podcast Your Career Will Thank You For: I’ve been a guest before but that’s not why I recommend it. Jeremy from Beyond UX Design just puts on one of the best podcasts in the industry.

• Uday’s Portfolio: This week is all about that premium Apple-esque feel. Uday’s portfolio really brings it.

Thank you for reading!

🎧 ONE OF MY FAVORITE DESIGN PODCASTS

Nobody got promoted because of their Figma skills alone

Don't get us wrong, craft matters. But if you've been doing great work and still feel stuck, overlooked, or like your ideas never quite land the way they should... the problem isn't your design skills. It's everything else.

Beyond UX Design is a weekly podcast for mid- to senior-level designers who are done letting soft skills be their blind spot.

Each week, host Jeremy Miller sits down with designers, strategists, and leaders to unpack the stuff that actually moves careers forward: influence, communication, navigating complex organizations, and building the kind of relationships that make great work possible in the first place.

Recent episodes include:

• Why waiting for permission to grow is a career-limiting mistake

• How to navigate complex orgs when best practices don't cut it

• The toxic myth of "getting a seat at the table" — and what to chase instead

Your Figma skills got you in the door. This podcast helps you figure out what happens next.

🎧️ Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts

Is Your Portfolio Aligned With the Roles You’re Applying For? 🤔

Recently, I’ve been helping a company look for a visual designer focused on marketing and brand. The role is centered around social media design, evolving the brand, and potentially some website work later on.

In other words: this is not a product or UX design role.

The job description didn’t mention product design. It didn’t mention UX design. The responsibilities were clearly around marketing design and brand work.

But when the applications came in and I started reviewing portfolios, something strange happened.

Most of the portfolios were product design portfolios.

Full UX case studies. SaaS dashboards. Mobile app redesigns. User flows. Wireframes.

All of that work might have been great if we had been looking for a product designer.

But we weren’t.

And in most of these portfolios there was almost no brand or marketing work at all. In only a few cases I could even find something related. And in none of them did I see social media or marketing design that was even remotely connected to the kind of work this company actually does and wants to hire for.

This happens the other way around too.

Whenever I mention that someone is looking for a product designer, people often send me portfolios full of graphic design work on Behance. T-shirt designs. Poster work. Brand explorations.

That work might be great in its own right.

But if someone is hiring for a SaaS product designer, they’re not going to look at a merch design and think: yes, this person clearly knows how to design complex product workflows.

That connection simply isn’t there and in 2026 no one is taking a chance thinking “Well, maybe they can despite not showing — let’s invite them!”

And that’s the core problem.

The First Rule Is Very Simple

If you want a role in X, your portfolio needs to show work in X.

If you want to be hired as a product designer, your portfolio should mainly show product design work.

If you want to work in brand and marketing, your portfolio needs to show brand and marketing work.

If you want to move into B2B SaaS, show something that relates to that kind of problem space.

This sounds obvious, but judging from the number of irrelevant portfolios people send to jobs, it’s clearly not obvious enough.

“But That’s the Only Work I Have”

This is the response I hear most often.

And sometimes it’s valid.

If you have freelance work in your portfolio that doesn’t perfectly match the role you’re applying for, that’s fine. Real world work can still be valuable for other reasons.

For example, if you’re applying for a B2B SaaS role but most of your work comes from B2C projects, keep that work in. It’s still product design. There will still be transferable thinking in there.

But you should think carefully about how you present that work.

Maybe there are aspects of the project that relate to more complex workflows, constraints, or system thinking. Highlight those parts. Frame the story in a way that makes the work relatable to the role you’re applying for.

Don’t force it if it’s not there. But make sure you surface the most relevant parts.

That’s the easy case.

The harder case is when your portfolio doesn’t contain any relevant work at all.

If You Want a Different Role, You Need Different Work

Let’s say your portfolio currently consists mostly of graphic design projects, but you want to move into product design.

You will need product design work in there.

That work can absolutely be fictional.

We are in 2026. You can build new projects and actually functioning products incredibly quickly compared to just a few years ago.

For example, if you want to move into B2B SaaS, build something that resembles a B2B problem.

The other week I built a finance tracker for my own freelance income and side projects. It handles invoices, tracks payments, and deals with a bunch of messy real-world cases.

I built it in a single weekend, mostly on the side.

It’s not perfect. It definitely doesn’t show my level of craft. But if I had spent a bit more time polishing the experience, it could easily become a very solid portfolio piece. Which is what I would have done with it if I was currently job hunting.

And more importantly: it deals with the kind of complexity you’d encounter in a real B2B SaaS environment.

That alone would make it more relevant to a B2B product design role than any graphic design project ever could.

You could even link to it, demo it, or show how it works.

Be creative. Come up with ideas. Build something.

You are a designer after all and I like to think we are a creative bunch.

Not Every Role Needs the Same Kind of Work

The same logic applies in other directions.

If you’re aiming for a consumer product or mobile app role, you might want to focus more on interaction quality and visual polish.

Spend time understanding how to craft really strong interactions. Use tools like Framer or any vibe coding tool, experiment with motion, build something that feels smooth and intentional.

Create something small but extremely polished.

Those kinds of experiments can be powerful signals too.

The point is not that every portfolio needs the same type of project. The point is that the work needs to be relevant to the role you want.

Why Relevance Matters So Much

When people apply for jobs with portfolios that contain nothing relevant to the role, they often wonder why they’re getting rejected.

The answer is usually very simple.

There are other candidates who are already showing relevant work.

And there are candidates who are showing relevant work that is also really good.

Those are the people who fill the interview pipeline.

So if your portfolio doesn’t demonstrate the skills needed for the role, you’re starting the process at a disadvantage.

The Market Has Drastically Changed

Ten years ago, the bar looked very different.

Back then you could land a UX role by showing that you understood basic UX principles and could produce the typical artifacts: wireframes, flows, prototypes.

If you interviewed well, that was often enough.

Five years ago things were already changing. Companies expected designers to show stronger product thinking and a better understanding of how design connects to business outcomes.

Today the expectations are higher still.

Designers are often expected to demonstrate craft, product thinking, systems thinking, and business awareness — and to do so in ways that are clearly relevant to the role they’re applying for.

Is that ideal?

Not necessarily.

But it is the reality of the market right now and even though we see signs of rebounds we will not go back to the standards from ten years ago.

What About Multidisciplinary Designers?

Another common question comes from designers who don’t want to specialize in just one thing.

They might enjoy product design, branding, illustration, motion, and marketing design.

That’s fine.

But there’s an important condition.

If you want to present yourself as multidisciplinary, you need to be very good at multiple things, not just interested in them.

A common problem is that portfolios show many different types of work, but the quality varies widely.

Sometimes one area is clearly much stronger than the others.

The first step is simply recognizing that.

And that’s hard to do on your own. When you’re looking at your own work every day, the lines tend to blur.

That’s why feedback matters.

Ask a few people you trust to look at your portfolio and tell you honestly what they think your strongest areas are.

Ideally people who won’t sugarcoat things.

Once you understand where your strengths are, you have two options.

You can focus on those strengths and aim for roles that emphasize them.

Or, if you truly want to be strong across multiple areas, you need to bring the weaker areas up to the same level.

That takes time. But it’s absolutely possible.

An amazing example of someone who really pulls the multidisciplinary portfolio of well (and got praise from me for that before) is Nivedha Nirmal. She shows an extremely high level of quality across the board in multiple disciplines and then ties this together in one seamless portfolio experience.

The Choice Is Mostly About How You Spend Your Time

If your portfolio doesn’t yet show the kind of work required for the roles you want, there are two ways to spend the next few weeks.

You can keep applying to jobs where your portfolio doesn’t demonstrate the required skills.

Or you can spend that time creating work that actually moves you closer to those roles.

One of those options usually leads to interviews.

The other most likely doesn’t.

The choice yours.

✨ CATCH-UP WITH AI

Go from AI overwhelmed to AI savvy professional

AI will eliminate 300 million jobs in the next 5 years.

Yours doesn't have to be one of them.

Here's how to future-proof your career:

• Join the Superhuman AI newsletter - read by 1M+ professionals

• Learn AI skills in 3 mins a day

• Become the AI expert on your team

Start learning AI now

👀 Portfolio Showcase

Today: Uday Shankar

This week’s portfolio comes from Uday Shankar, a designer currently studying Human–Computer Interaction at the University of Maryland, College Park.

And the first thing that struck me when opening his portfolio was the overall feel of it.

It has that premium, almost boutique-studio aesthetic. The kind of visual tone you might expect from a well-known design agency or a polished product studio.

Interestingly, this is quite different from many junior portfolios we’ve looked at recently. A lot of them lean into playful visual styles — doodly illustrations, hand-drawn elements, experimental interactions.

Uday’s work goes in a very different direction.

It’s clean, controlled, and minimal, much closer to that Apple-like visual language that focuses on restraint and polish. And that style is actually much harder to execute well than it looks. When you remove visual noise, every small decision suddenly becomes visible.

But overall, Uday really pulls it off.

There are a couple of caveats we’ll discuss later, but this is undeniably a very strong portfolio with excellent craft and thoughtful project presentation.

Let’s break down what works particularly 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