Hey and welcome back to a new week!

I’ve recently been more active on X again because after all this time it still feels like you can’t avoid it if you want to see and connect with cracked designers. My following is tiny over there but if you follow my advice from the article below and post cool work, I will absolutely share that! You can find me here.

In this issue:

• If You Nail These Interviews Will Follow: Your jobhunt doesn’t need to be overly complicated. If you nail the basics of the job search things can quickly turn for you.

• Want to See How A Senior Designer Solves Design Tasks?: My buddy Darshan collected all design tasks he solved from his last job hunt and is publishing them with video commentary and so much more! Absolute goldmine and you can get 10% off as a trusted Open Doors reader.

• Georgius’ Portfolio: A really great portfolio in terms of presentation and curation.

Thank you for reading!

🤯 MY BUDDY DARSHAN COLLECTED HIS SOLVED DESIGN TASKS FOR YOU

Design Tasks – Get An Insight Into Real Design Assignments From A Senior / Staff Designer

A collection of real design take-home assignments I completed while interviewing for senior, staff, and founding product designer roles.

This resource gives you a closer look into my process as an experienced designer — from understanding the problem space to shaping the final outcome.

Here's what's inside. Use FRIENDS10 to get 10% off.

The Essentials for a Design Job Search in 2026 🧭

The design market has improved a bit.

Not enough for people to relax. Not enough for anyone to call it easy. But enough that it feels wrong to keep talking about it as if nothing is moving. There are roles out there. There are opportunities. And if you are strong in the right ways, you can absolutely get interviews and even have opportunities come your way.

At the same time, the market has a strong bias right now toward people who can execute well across the board. That includes visual quality. That includes presenting work well. And now, increasingly, that also includes some degree of AI literacy.

There is also a lot of nonsense floating around.

Companies ask for “AI-native designers” without knowing what they mean. Job descriptions are full of inflated expectations. People get distracted by ATS panic, gimmicks, hacks, and other forms of noise. And meanwhile, the people who are actually succeeding are often doing something much less glamorous: they get the fundamentals very tight, they put themselves out there, and they make it easy for others to understand why they are worth talking to.

That’s what this article is about.

Not every possible thing you could do. Just the essentials. The few things I would focus on if I were job hunting right now from junior to senior IC.

1. Your CV still matters

This one is boring, but it is still essential.

Can someone get hired without a CV? Sure, in theory. If they are already highly established, if their portfolio is world-class, if their name already carries weight. But for almost everyone else, your CV is still the document that gets your information into the system before anyone really knows you.

That means it has one job: make your value easy to scan.

Do not overdesign it.

Make it clean. Make it readable. Make the typography good. If you want, you can lightly align it with your portfolio visually. But do not turn it into some experiment. Go for scannability. And I mean both human scannability and machine scannability.

For humans, that means:

• clean layout

• normal section names

• no strange formatting ideas

• no forcing personality where clarity should be

Your skills section does not need to be called “Abilities.” Your experience section does not need to become “Impact Journey.” Stop doing that stuff.

For machines, it means your resume has to be readable by systems too. ATS is not as all-powerful as people think, but it is also not irrelevant. If your file cannot be parsed properly, you may not get enriched in the system the way other candidates do. That does not always mean rejection, but it can mean you start lower in the pile.

So keep it simple.

Use Word, Google Docs, Canva, or a resume builder like Curvit. Export to PDF properly. Make sure the text is embedded and readable. Figma PDF export is often weak for this, so I would avoid relying on it.

And then leave it alone.

Do not spend weeks perfecting your CV. Do not obsess over every keyword. If you have the basics right, strong scannability, real impact in your bullets instead of only responsibilities, and a file machines can read, you are good enough. Everything after that has diminishing returns.

I wrote about everything a resume / CV needs before here and also covered myths and facts about ATS before here too. 

For a sense check you can use my free ATS checker tool that will give you an insight into how your resume is seen by these systems.

2. Your portfolio is table stakes

This should not be a surprise, but I still have to say it.

If you do not have a portfolio, you are not getting hired in product or UX design.

And in 2026, there is also no excuse for putting that portfolio on Behance, Notion, Dribbble, or any other ultra-generic surface that you do not control properly.

I keep saying this because people still do it.

The bar has been raised. That alone should be enough reason to stop.

Everyone can build a decent portfolio site now. You can use Framer (even COMPLETELY free if you are an enrolled student). You can use Lovable. You can use Claude Code, Codex or Cursor. You can build something plain and simple if that is all you can manage right now. Even a very basic custom portfolio is already better than dumping your work into a generic platform that was not designed for this discipline.

Behance is fine for graphic design. Motion too, in many cases. Those assets often speak for themselves.

Product design does not work like that.

You need structure. Storytelling. Better control over what people see first, what they click next, and how the work is framed. Generic platforms work against you there.

Your portfolio does not need to do everything. But it does need to do a few things well:

• introduce you properly

• show your strongest core work

• include a bit of extra impressive work that may not be full case-study material

• tell me a little bit about who you are

That’s it.

Lead with the real-world work if you have it. Internship, freelance, company work, volunteer work, study projects if that is what you have. Show the stronger business-relevant case studies first. Then, after that, show the extra interesting work. Motion, interactions, experiments, smaller things that are impressive but not large enough to carry the whole portfolio.

And do not skip the “about me” bit entirely. Hiring managers are still hiring people. Say something genuine. Not generic process worship. Not “I follow the double diamond.” Tell me something that helps me understand who you are and why you might fit the type of role you’re applying for.

Can people get away with a PDF portfolio or a slide deck? Sometimes, yes. Usually when the work is already strong enough to carry them through despite the format.

But that is not the standard you should benchmark yourself against.

If you are early or mid-career, go build the proper portfolio.

I cover portfolio topics very regularly but here are some recent highlights you can catch up on:

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

5 Ways to Instantly Level Up Your Portfolio ⚡ 

The Ultimate Portfolio Guide for Product Designers in 2026 🎒 

3. AI literacy is now part of the package

A lot of companies are now looking for “AI-native” designers.

The term is vague. Different companies mean different things. But the overlap is large enough that we can still talk clearly about it.

And first of all, no, putting “AI-native” into your LinkedIn headline is not the move.

I actually recommend you don’t do that.

As always, you can call yourself anything. It means nothing if you do not show it.

What matters is whether AI is visibly part of how you work and what you can produce with it.

I’d split this into three layers.

Layer 1: basic LLM literacy

This is the foundation now.

If you work in tech and you are not regularly using ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or something similar for writing, brainstorming, exploring ideas, checking feasibility, and generally supporting your thinking, you are behind.

That is not a criticism. It is just where we are.

Knowing how to prompt decently, how to improve outputs, and even how to use one LLM to help you create better prompts for another tool, that is basic literacy at this point.

Layer 2: design-relevant AI workflows

This is where most of the industry is.

Using tools like Lovable, Cursor, Codex, Cloud Code, Figma Make, or similar to prototype, build, accelerate workflows, and create more impressive outputs. This is the layer companies are most interested in right now.

And honestly, if you are already here, you are in a good place.

The nuance is in how seriously you do it. Dabbling once a month is not the same as actively building with these tools. But if you are regularly using them to make things, especially things that are visible in your portfolio, that already counts for a lot.

This is also the layer where I would tell most people to invest right now if they feel behind.

And please, do not buy some absurdly expensive course on this.

There is so much free information, so much visible experimentation, so many examples, so many repos, tutorials, workflows, and people sharing how they work. You can learn a huge amount simply by doing.

Layer 3: agentic workflows

This is the more advanced layer.

Not just using AI tools manually, but setting up workflows where AI does multiple steps more autonomously. I’m starting to do more of this myself. For example, having Codex work through tasks overnight, or moving toward workflows where changes in Figma can trigger downstream code actions more automatically.

Most people are not here yet.

That is fine.

If you are in layer one, move toward layer two.

If you are in layer two, you are in a good place, just keep going.

If you are already in layer three, you are ahead of the curve.

And one important thing: if AI is part of how you work, show it. Not loudly. Not in some cringe way. Just clearly. If you built something with these tools, mention that. Let it be visible in the portfolio.

4. Show your work in public

This is the bonus one.

And I almost hesitate to call it a bonus, because I think it matters nearly as much as the others.

Show your work.

Show experiments. Show cool interactions. Show a shader you built. Show a neat flow. Show something interesting you made with vibe coding tools. Show things that are fun, thoughtful, or impressive.

LinkedIn and X are the main places for this.

X tends to reward more visual, punchy, impressive stuff. LinkedIn usually benefits from a bit more context. Both can work.

And no, I am not telling you to become an influencer.

That misunderstanding needs to die too.

You do not need to comment on everything, post every day, farm engagement, or build some fake personal brand. You just need to get your work in front of the kinds of people who might care about it.

That alone can go a surprisingly long way.

I started posting more again recently, especially around interactions, Framer work, shaders, and vibe-coded experiments. My following on X is tiny. Still, some things resonated. Not massive numbers. That is not the point. The point is that even a small post, if the right person sees it, can matter.

There are plenty of examples of that.

Andrea da Silva got her portfolio amplified and ended up landing an internship at MetaLab. Emmi Wu also told me that opportunities came her way because she kept posting her work and interactions online. Those are not ordinary outcomes, sure. But they are also not random fairy dust. They happened because the work was visible.

That is the point.

Treat posting as a secondary portfolio. A live layer of proof that you are doing things, making things, exploring things, and getting better.

Even if one post gets five likes, the next one might not.

And again, I would much rather see you post good work on LinkedIn or X than dump it onto Behance and hope for a miracle.

That’s it, honestly

People often want a more complicated answer than this.

But if I were job hunting in design right now, from junior through senior IC, I would focus on these things first:

• a clean, machine-readable CV

• a proper portfolio on a surface you control

• visible AI literacy, ideally at least on the second layer

• and putting my work in public where the right people can actually see it

Everything else tends to become noise very quickly.

That does not mean there are no other useful things. Networking matters. Outreach matters. Positioning matters. Interview prep matters. All true. But these are the essentials. These are the things I would not negotiate with myself on.

Because the market may be a bit better now, but it still does not reward vagueness, weak execution, or passive hope.

It rewards people who make it easy to understand what they can do, who they are, and why they are worth speaking to.

That’s still the game.

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👀 Portfolio Showcase

Today: Georgius Bryan

Georgius Bryan graduated from York University last year.

Since then, he has spent time interning at AMD, building side projects, experimenting with new technologies, and refining a portfolio that already feels far more mature than what you’d expect from someone still looking for their first full-time role.

In fact, if Georgius graduated last year and finished his internship at the end of 2025, I’d argue he has been overlooked.

Because what stands out immediately is not only the quality of the work itself, but how thoughtfully it is presented. There is a strong sense of craft throughout the portfolio. He clearly cares about interaction design, motion, storytelling, and the details that make products feel polished.

At the same time, he is part of a newer generation of designers who don’t stop at mockups. He builds things. He experiments. He ships projects because he wants to see what happens when ideas leave Figma and become real.

That combination makes for a very compelling portfolio.

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