Today: Efan Song

Efan Song’s portfolio is a quiet masterclass in clarity and restraint.

A Toronto-based product designer with a background in architecture, Efan brings a level of discipline and structure to her portfolio that’s instantly noticeable. Her site doesn’t scream for attention — it earns it. It’s clean, deliberate, and refreshingly free from fluff. You won’t find any overdesigned visuals or long-winded process writeups here. Instead, Efan’s portfolio rewards anyone who slows down long enough to see what she’s actually doing: showing real product thinking with elegance and control.

While her hero section and overall layout are minimalist, the work itself carries the weight. Every project feels purposeful and reflective — the product of someone who’s learned how to say more with less. And that’s exactly what makes her portfolio so good: it’s calm, confident, and well-composed.

For early-career designers who lean toward overexplaining or overdecorating their work, Efan’s portfolio is a fantastic reference for how to achieve balance. Let’s unpack what makes it so strong — and where it could go even further.

The Good

Exceptional written storytelling

Efan’s writing is easily one of the strongest aspects of her portfolio. Her case studies read like they’ve been edited three times over — concise, meaningful, and free from unnecessary filler. She understands that attention spans are short and that clarity wins every time.

Each paragraph is short — often just one to three lines — but every sentence serves a purpose. She manages to cover what she did, why it mattered, and what changed because of it without losing flow. That’s a rare skill.

Her storytelling feels cohesive because she knows what matters to the reader. She doesn’t drown you in research boards or endless process documentation; she picks out what’s essential, summarizes key takeaways, and uses visuals to fill the gaps. You never wonder what happened next — it’s all neatly tied together.

For anyone who struggles to trim their case studies down, Efan’s portfolio is a perfect example of how less can be far more.

Consistency without repetition

There’s a quiet professionalism in how Efan structures her work. Each case study feels unique in tone and color — but the reading experience is consistent. Headings, layouts, image treatments, and writing structure all follow a similar rhythm, making it effortless to navigate.

She lets each project have its own visual identity through subtle palette changes that echo the product itself — for example, warmer tones for the university club management app, cooler tones for more data-heavy work — while keeping typography, spacing, and flow unified. This balance between individuality and coherence is hard to achieve, but she nails it.

You get the feeling she’s thought deeply about how each case study contributes to her overall story. That kind of composure and consistency builds trust — and makes her portfolio feel mature and deliberate.

The Potential

Making her case studies more inviting

While Efan’s projects are strong once you click into them, her homepage could do more to pull people in. Her visuals are well chosen — they communicate what the product is and look clean — but the titles and descriptions don’t create curiosity.

Most of her project titles simply name the product. For someone unfamiliar with these products (which most recruiters will be), there’s little reason to click through. Instead, she could focus on impact and contribution. For example:

These types of titles immediately show what she did — and make the viewer want to learn how. She already has the content to support this in her case studies; it’s just about surfacing that insight earlier.

Her homepage doesn’t need more visuals — it needs more intent. Each element should serve the goal of making the viewer click. Right now, the visuals are doing the heavy lifting alone.

Show the work, not just the story

While Efan’s written storytelling is excellent, her visual storytelling has room to grow. The current structure — text, image, text, image — feels predictable and limits how deeply we can engage with the actual design work.

Her before/after comparisons are conceptually solid, but the visuals are often too small to appreciate the detail of her work. The same goes for GIFs and prototype clips, which feel a bit constrained by the narrow column layout. A few larger breakouts — like full-width annotated mockups or a scrollable product flow — would immediately give her designs more weight and presence.

She could also experiment with breaking up the visual rhythm — mixing in side-by-side layouts, slightly wider imagery, or even short, looping video snippets that highlight key interactions. The idea isn’t to overload the reader — it’s to create moments that invite closer inspection.

Right now, the visuals support the story; with some structural adjustments, they could lead it.

Final Thoughts

Efan’s portfolio is one of those rare examples of restraint done right. It’s quiet but confident, minimal but intentional, and deeply professional. She writes with clarity, designs with structure, and edits with precision.

If she sharpens the entry points to her case studies and gives her visuals a bit more room to breathe, she’ll move from “quietly good” to “undeniably excellent.”

For anyone who wants to see how to tell a product story without noise or fluff — this is one to study.

You might have guessed it — Efan’s portfolio was done with Framer.

Still struggling to get your portfolio off the ground?

Don’t want to spend weeks learning yet another tool? Framer is my top recommendation for building your portfolio — fast, clean, and without the usual headaches.

Efan focussed on her content, curating it and putting it together in a consistent way. Framer is the perfect tool for that. It allows you to design as if you were still in your other main design tool and let’s you focus on content and the details rather than overwhelming you with a lot of new things to learn.

If you’re just starting out (or even if you’re not), I think Framer is a perfect fit. Here’s why:

• Flat learning curve: The interface feels familiar if you’ve used Figma — plus, there’s a plugin to bring your designs straight in.

• Plenty of learning support: Framer Academy is packed with free tutorials, videos, and guides to help you go from zero to published.

• A huge template library: Tons of high-quality (often free) templates in the marketplace to help you launch quickly without starting from scratch.

And that’s just scratching the surface. I wrote more about why I recommend Framer here—but honestly, the best way is to try it for yourself.

Affiliate disclaimer: I only recommend tools I personally believe in. Some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you choose to purchase — at no extra cost to you.

How I can help YOU

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