Hey and welcome back to a new week!

In this issue:

• Ensure You Are Seen For The Roles YOU Care About: Positioning is hard and often overlooked but so essential. Let me break it down for you.

• The Open Doors x Framer Student Challenge: Don’t forget to check this one out and pre-register here!

• Keen To Learn About AI & Design Systems? I got you with this workshop. Readers get $25 off!

• Queenie’s Portfolio: This portfolio contains a crazy amount of good work!

Thank you for reading!

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

A while ago, I made a LinkedIn post about this topic and the comment section got a bit heated.

One guy got a lot of likes for pushing back on what he thought I was saying. His argument was that it’s unreasonable to expect designers to redo their whole portfolio for every single role they apply to.

And on that point, I agree with him.

That would be a terrible use of time.

It is also not what I said.

I am not telling you to craft a new portfolio for every job. I never would. That is busy work. It drains your energy and usually leads nowhere.

What I am telling you to do is something else.

Figure out what you are good at. Figure out what type of design role that suits best. Then curate your portfolio, resume, and overall profile once so they all support that direction.

That is positioning.

And in this market, it matters a lot more than many people want to admit.

Because a lot of designers are not getting filtered out only because they are bad. They are getting filtered out because they are vague, mismatched, or pointing in too many directions at once.

Positioning is not tailoring for every application

This is the misunderstanding I keep seeing.

You are not supposed to rebuild your portfolio every time you click apply.

You are supposed to decide what lane you are strongest in, then make your materials coherent around that lane.

That is a one-time strategic move, not a per-job ritual.

Of course there can be light adjustments. A title here. A bullet point there. Maybe changing the order of two projects. Fine.

But if you constantly feel the need to heavily tailor everything, that usually means the role is not a clean fit for your current profile in the first place.

A good profile reduces how much tailoring is even needed.

It gives you leverage because the story already holds together:

• your intro says the right thing

• your resume reinforces it

• your case studies back it up

• your overall work points in the same direction

That is what makes targeted applying work.

Your portfolio should point where you want your career to go

A portfolio is not only a record of what you have done.

It is a signal.

It tells people what kind of work you understand, what kind of problems you care about, and where they should place you in their head.

That is why project choice matters so much.

A lot of designers treat portfolios like storage. They keep everything in there and hope the quality will somehow speak for itself.

It rarely works that way.

Most portfolios need fewer projects, not more. Three or four well-chosen case studies that sit comfortably next to each other will usually do more for you than six projects pulling in different directions.

And the question is not “what was fun?” or “what looked nice?”

It is:

Does this project move me closer to the kinds of roles I want to be considered for?

If the answer is no, it may still be a cool project. It may even still be good work. But it is probably not helping your profile much.

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

This sounds painfully obvious, yet it gets missed all the time.

If you want to be hired into product design, your portfolio should mostly show product design work.

If you want brand or marketing roles, then brand and marketing work needs to be visible.

If you want B2B SaaS roles, show work that deals with that kind of complexity. Workflows. Systems. Dense information. Business logic. Tradeoffs.

If you want consumer mobile roles, the bar for visual polish and interaction detail goes up sharply. Then your work needs to show that.

And I have a very clear example of how badly this can go wrong.

Recently, I tried to help a company hire a brand designer. They were very open to someone a bit more junior, which made me optimistic because helping with product design and research hiring had usually gone well for me before.

This time, it was surprisingly hard.

Hardly anyone who applied showed anything remotely relevant.

Almost everyone sent product design or UX portfolios. Full case studies, app work, dashboards, typical product material. Sometimes there was one small branding or marketing project somewhere in there, but it never showed enough range in that area to make the fit believable. And when brand work did show up, it often pointed in a completely different direction from what this company actually needed. They were looking for someone who could translate a fairly technical brand into something appealing and usable. What I got instead was whimsical consumer brand work, colorful lifestyle concepts, ice cream branding, that kind of thing.

Some of those applicants may well have been good designers. That was never really the issue.

The issue was that they weren’t showing the type of work, or the range within that type of work, that would have made the fit credible to the company. And because this was a fast-moving startup, that mattered. They were open to giving a junior a chance, but they still needed someone who could step into this particular kind of work without a massive ramp-up period. That’s a fair ask.

What confused me most was that no one really seemed to recognize that this was the kind of role where going a little further could have changed the outcome. If someone had put together a small, thoughtful, custom mini-case study in that direction, and done it well, I would absolutely have pushed for them. That kind of effort would have shown both understanding and intent.

But sending a generic portfolio to a role like this and hoping for the best was never going to solve the problem.

You do not need to niche yourself into a corner

This is where people often get nervous.

They hear “position yourself” and think they now have to become the world’s leading designer for one tiny niche.

That is not the goal.

Strong positioning is broad enough to travel, but clear enough to feel deliberate.

For example, calling yourself a healthcare designer can box you in. Framing yourself around complex workflows, decision-heavy interfaces, or business-facing tools gives you much more room while still saying something useful.

That is the level you want to think on.

Not “what exact industry forever.”

More like:

What kind of problems am I strongest at solving?

That gives you range without making you blurry.

Your strengths may point somewhere less sexy than you hoped

This is another thing people do not love hearing.

A lot of juniors dream about polished consumer apps. Beautiful mobile interfaces. Cool brands. Motion-heavy products people love to screenshot.

And then they keep building toward that, even when their current strengths are not taking them there.

Meanwhile, they may already be much better suited to a different type of role. More business-facing products. More complex flows. More systems-heavy work. More structure, less gloss.

That does not sound as glamorous.

But it may be the cleaner way in.

If your current work is stronger in logic, workflows, edge cases, or product structure than in shiny interaction-heavy visual craft, you may be fighting the wrong battle by forcing yourself toward flashy consumer roles.

Positioning is partly about self-awareness.

Not only what do I want, but also:

What am I strongest at right now?

And:

Where does that strength actually have value?

Those questions matter.

Your resume has to support the same story

Positioning does not stop at the portfolio.

If your portfolio says one thing and your resume says another, the whole thing weakens. The same goes for your LinkedIn, your intro, and the wording around your experience.

This is why targeted applications only work when the foundation is already there. If the role is in your lane, the resume should make that obvious too. The case studies should reinforce it. Even the way you describe your work should match the kind of problems those companies care about.

That does not mean stuffing keywords everywhere.

It means building a profile that feels consistent from every angle.

You can still pivot, but you have to do it on purpose

One of the hardest cases is when the work you already have points in one direction, but the roles you want point in another.

Then the answer is not to keep applying and hoping people will connect the dots for you.

They usually won’t.

You have to help them.

Sometimes that means reframing the parts of your work that are more transferable. Sometimes it means emphasizing a different layer of an existing project. Sometimes it means building something new that better supports the lane you want to move into.

That is not unfair. That is the work of shaping your signal.

If your current portfolio is mostly graphic design work and you want product roles, then yes, you need product work in there.

If your portfolio is mostly light B2C work and you want B2B SaaS roles, then yes, you need something that deals with the kind of complexity those teams care about.

You do not fix that with words alone.

You fix it by making the work tell the right story.

A few portfolios that do this well

Nicolas Donati (read my showcase of his portfolio here) — Nicolas clearly positioned himself for B2B SaaS roles and the more enterprise side of design. Language, brands and the overall appearance make this a clear fit at first glance.

Sydney Rasmussen (read my showcase of her portfolio here) — Sydney is well geared for enterprise design roles. She explicitly states that and her work is very metric-focussed which is definitely favorable for this type of work. Her strategic focus becomes clear at first glance.

Amy La (read my showcase of her portfolio here) — Amy’s positioning is more subtle but clear: she is working on consumer-facing things with a heavy bias for mobile apps. She is showing the necessary level of craft to perform in that environment and even built out a little moat with the focus on creator-enabling software. Nothing that limits her too hard but at the same time gives her profile a unique edge.

This is mostly about where you put your time

You can spend weeks applying to roles that do not match your current profile very well.

Or you can spend that time building a sharper profile that is easier to understand, easier to trust, and much harder to overlook.

One of those usually leads to better interviews.

The other usually leads to confusion and wasted effort.

And that is why this topic matters so much to me.

Because the advice floating around here often gets flattened into two bad extremes:

• tailor everything constantly

• or refuse to shape your profile at all

Both are bad.

The better move sits in the middle.

Decide where you are strongest. Decide what kind of roles that maps to. Curate your portfolio, resume, and overall story around that. Then apply in that direction with much more intent.

That is not gaming the system.

That is showing the market where you fit.

And in 2026, that clarity is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

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👀 Portfolio Showcase

Today: Queenie Hsiao

Queenie Hsiao’s portfolio feels like the output of someone who is relentlessly curious about interfaces, interactions, and what digital products can feel like when someone genuinely obsesses over the details.

She was previously an intern at Uber and is now returning there full-time straight out of NYU Tisch, and honestly, after going through this portfolio, it’s very easy to understand why.

The whole experience already feels different from most product design portfolios. The side-scrolling structure, the FigJam-like canvas feeling, the amount of experimentation packed into every corner of the site. It all creates the impression that Queenie is someone constantly building, testing, and exploring ideas.

And what impressed me most is that there’s just so much here.

Not filler. Not unfinished scraps. Actual high-quality work, interaction experiments, prototypes, shipped concepts, and visual explorations that all reinforce the same thing: this is someone deeply invested in making digital experiences feel good.

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