This is the second article in a three-part series offering tips on how to get a job as a product or UX designer. Part 1 covers your resume and LinkedIn profile. Part 3 is about the interviewing process.

Part 2: Your Portfolio

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, portfolios used to be physical cases filled with your work, and you only had one of them. But now that portfolios are online, it’s much easier to get your work out there.

Much like resumes, many designers make the mistake of over-designing their portfolio website, trying to use it as a canvas to show their visual design or interaction chops. Don’t do it.

This is the first article in a three-part series offering tips on how to get a job as a product or UX designer. Part 2 advises on your portfolio website. Part 3 covers the interviewing process.

Part 1: Your Resume & LinkedIn Profile

(With apologies to Maxine Paetro, whose seminal 1979 book  How to Put Your Book Together and Get a Job in Advertising was highly influential in my early job search process in the mid-1990s.)

I graduated from design school in the spring of 1995. Yahoo! was incorporated just a couple of months before. AOL was still the dominant way everyone connected to the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web was still a baby, with just a tiny fraction of websites available. In other words, my design education was about graphic design—layout, typography, logos, print. Neither digital design nor UX design was taught or barely practiced yet. (The closest thing would be human-computer interaction, more computer science than design.)

The San Francisco graphic design scene back in the early- to mid-1990s was pretty close-knit. Most of the established practitioners in The City taught at the California College of Arts & Crafts (CCAC, but now shortened to California College of the Arts (CCA)), fertile ground for finding interns and junior designers. Regardless, all of us graduating seniors needed to have portfolios. Physical portfolios. Some books—another name for portfolio—were basic: a leather folio with plastic slip pages filled with mocked-up posters, booklets, or photos of projects. Or some designers would custom bind books with special hardware and print their work on fine paper, spending hundreds of dollars. But you had one book. So when applying for jobs, you had to leave your book with the design studio for a few days to a week! Which meant that job hunting was very slow going.

Obviously, Covid-19 wreaked havoc on the world and countless lives this past year. We all know someone who caught the virus or died from it, or we were infected ourselves. We tried to do our part by staying home to limit our exposure to other people. We stayed away from our loved ones to protect them and to slow the spread. To keep ourselves occupied, many of us took up baking, cooking, knitting, or exercising. I started on what would become a yearlong path of learning about whatever interested me.

YouTube as a Gateway to Knowledge

Video site YouTube saw an explosion in traffic from people bored in lockdown. I was one of them. At first, I was simply trying to learn how to optimize my work-from-home setup. Channels such as Podcastage and Curtis Judd taught me about microphones, and I upgraded my audio setup.