Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Nejat Seçkin Oral

You feel ready to earn money. What now?

You just graduated from a design school or you are a self taught aspiring designer. You feel like you’re finally ready to start earning money. What now? If “creating a portfolio” is not the first thing that comes to your mind, you’ll quickly realize you definitely need a portfolio as soon as you apply to your first design job. You made your research on creating a portfolio, maybe you looked at other successful people’s portfolios. Now you need to create your portfolio but you don’t have any works to showcase on your portfolio. Wait.. Aren’t you supposed to get a project/job first to showcase any work on your portfolio? What’s up with this loop?

Clients or the company that’s going to hire you needs to see your style, how you approach to problems and your technical capabilities but when there’s no “real product” on the table, it’s hard to work on imaginary concepts. Obviously, I’m not talking about concept Dribbble shots. Real problem is that you need to create and also solve problems all by yourself.

So what can you do to break out of this loop?

Try Redesigning

Redesigning is actually a fairly popular technique among aspiring designers (especially for new starters) to populate portfolio works. Most common mistake here is doing it ineffectively.

How do you re-design a product effectively?

You shouldn’t forget that, at the end of the day, your job is to think of solutions for problems. Try to find a product with real problems. Redesign to solve those problems, present it with a case study, furthermore document your process with a blog post. Make sure the problems you solve are related to the field you’re specialized in. In short, there’s no point of rearrenging every UI element, switching the company’s main color blue with red and creating a new logo just for the sake of “re-imagining” Facebook. Of course, you can change other parts to adapt to your solution but the point is, you should know that these brands/products (especially ones as big as Facebook) have tons of decision mechanisms, tests, brand values etc. behind the scenes.

I suggest taking a closer look around you instead of reviewing complex products like Amazon/Facebook/Ebay. I got one of my first gigs by redesigning a local social media app that I used often in my daily life.

Search results for “facebook redesign” on Dribbble.

Offer your services to those around you first

Are you a branding designer? You can start by offering help to the local shops around you. Tell them about how their logo can be looked at a different perspective or how you can help them about showing their brand more upfront on social media.

Are you interested in UI/UX design? Maybe you could review local startup products, reach them about the problems and solutions you came up with and offer designing a better experience for them. Almost every country/city has a facebook group for local startups. Keep your eyes open.

Another example could be looking around you closer. I’m sure at least one of your family members or friends is in need of a website. Remember, they don’t necessarily need to know they need it, you can be the one offering building a website for them.

When you offer your services to the people around you, sometimes you might need to work for less — or free. Even though I’m against working for free, I think what’s important here is your longer term goals.

If your goal is to get “real projects” for your portfolio, working for less or free might open doors to better projects in the future.

In this case, make sure the project is exciting for you or else you might get bored easily. You wouldn’t like to showcase projects that you’re not proud of, would you?

A Logo work for a local musician by Aaron Eccles

Create Side Projects

Contrary to common belief, creating site projects doesn’t cost that much and no, you don’t need an investor to execute your idea.

“Startups, websites, applications, hardware” — These words might have popped up on your head as soon as you heard of the word “side project” but even a e-mail newsletter that you share information can be a side project. You can start a podcast or sell digital goods such as UI kits, themes or icon sets. If you’re an illustrator, perhaps you could even create your own apparel brand.

You don’t really need to worry about building a business. You might try selling and end up with zero sales but it shouldn’t keep you from sharing your designs on your portfolio. If you ever participate in a job interview after passing the portfolio/introduction stage, you can talk about the failure of your brand honestly.

How does an email newsletter, a podcast or digital goods help your portfolio though?

First, aside from being a designer, sharing what you know is a big plus for your clients and companies that’s going to hire you. Second, as a designer, whatever you work on is going to contain designs this way or that way. A logo, maybe a banner or a landing page will be needed for the newsletter. Same applies to the podcast. For the digital goods, well, they’re already the products you designed. In conclusion, you’re creating a real product/service and you’ll have designs to showcase on your portfolio in the end.

Intro To Icons, Matt D Smith tarafından hayata geçirilmiş, kâr amacı gütmeyen bir yan proje

Are these all for the sideprojects? Of course not. Think of the problems you face in your daily life. Do you forget to drink water? Maybe you could build a browser extension to help you remind drinking water. Maybe you’d like to build a “mini player” instead of opening “Spotify” each time you’d like to change the song, who knows?

Building an extension is a cool idea! But.. How?

If you don’t have enough coding knowledge, I suggest making developer friends as soon as possible because you’re going to need them. There’re tons of communities that contains both developers and designers — like “Tasarım Mutfağı” from Turkey. You can start with joining one. Another way to meet with developers is attending hackathons and community events. It’s a completely different experience to create projects in limited time with people you meet at hackathons.

Focus on creating more, instead of a unique idea

Your project might not get used or you might even not be able to develop the actual product. To be honest, the water reminder extension I mentioned above, Woota, was an idea of a friend. It’s been 1 year since I’ve handed over the design files but he never finished coding 🙂 He moved to Madrid, to start a new job at Amazon and I got 2 new gigs right after sharing the designs on my portfolio.

Woota

To sum up

Breaking the “Portfolio for Work — Work for Portfolio” loop is actually easier than you think. People that’s going to hire you would like to see if you’re qualified for the job or not.the suggestions above should be enough for a kickstart.

I learned some of these by trial and error, some of them from other people’s advices.

After your first job, it becomes easily time after time. Especially for freelancers or agency workers, it’s relatively easier to keep their portfolios up to date. If you ever land a job at a startup with a single product to work on, I suggest you not to fall for “leaving your portfolio as it is” hell hole. You wouldn’t like to showcase works that represent your skillset from 2–3 years ago.

PS. Since “What you need to know before you create a portfolio” is a subject of another blog post, I preferred not to talk abou it. You can get pretty good insights from the links below.

Avoid these 5 things when building your design portfolio — Tobias Van Schneider
5 Dos and Don’ts for Your Design Portfolio — Heather Phillips
What I Learned after reviewing 1,000+ Design Portfolios — Joel Beukelman

Nejat Seçkin is a UI/UX Designer based in Istanbul, Turkey that has a huge passion for creating interfaces that people would love to use everyday with ease. You can find me on Dribbble, Behance, Twitter or Instagram.

Designer’s Dilemma: “Portfolio for Work — Work for Portfolio” was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Designer’s Dilemma: “Portfolio for Work — Work for Portfolio”

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