How to Get a Design Job: Five Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me
Hi friends,
This week I was looking at some student design portfolios. This brought me back to when I was looking for my first design job, ten years ago. It was an uncertain time. I was doing a post-graduation internship at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, constantly working on my portfolio and applying to jobs on the side.
I was trying to break into the glossy world of design consulting, applying to top firms in San Francisco, New York, and Boston. I didn’t get a single response. It was frustrating and discouraging.
Just as in design work, design hiring is subjective and based on so many factors that it can be impossible to pinpoint where you went wrong. Each company is also looking for something different, so advice that’s applicable to one job may not be to another.
I did eventually get a design consulting job, but only after a hard look at my own work, a concerted effort to level up in certain areas, a personal connection in my network, and of course a bit of luck and good timing.
This week I wrote a post on LinkedIn, asking design students/young professionals to share their biggest challenges in the job search process and design professionals to share their advice to entry-level applicants. Clearly it struck a chord with both communities. It’s gathered over 20,000 views and almost 300 engagements in the last three days.
I’m going to summarize some of the inputs I got and my own thoughts in the blog post below. These are things that I wish someone might have told me when I was looking for my first job.
These won’t be highly technical tips about how to lay out a portfolio or the best software to make a website, but higher-level advice about the process of landing your first gig.
Anson
Sharpen your hook
In writing, the hook is usually the first sentence of a piece that grabs your attention so you want to read on. The same can be applied to design portfolios.
What makes the reviewer want to dive deeper into your projects?
What’s your hook?
It’s been said before, but it’s true so it bears repeating: on first review, your portfolio will only get ~30 seconds of attention. If there’s nothing that immediately grabs the viewer, it will get passed.
Figure out what’s unique and attention grabbing about your work, and double down on communicating it visually. If you’re not sure what your hook is, ask a friend, teacher, or mentor.
Your hook could be:
Unique projects (for me, NASA was a pretty unique portfolio piece. I emphasized that hard.)
Clever solutions that haven’t been done before
Usability and prototyping (this was another part of my hook)
High quality renderings or animations
Impressive working prototypes
Any unique quality your work has that is uncommon
Even better is if you can overlap two elements to make a more unique hook.
For example:
Unique projects + high quality renderings
High quality renderings of final designs + low-fidelity working prototypes
Niche down and aim for relevance
When I talk to students I always ask them, “What kind of design job are you looking for? What company would you most want to work for?”.
It’s surprising to me how often it seems they haven’t really thought about it.
This is probably the most important question in your job search. In order to have a good chance of success, you need to have some idea of what success means to you.
Take some time to think about what specific niche you want to be working in. Is it furniture design? Power tools? If you can, talk to people in that niche and see if it’s right for you.
Once you have a niche in mind, make a list of top companies in that niche that you might want to work for. Look at the design work that they have on their website. The best way to know what a potential employer is looking for is to look at the work they put out. Does your work look like what they do, in terms of content and quality?
This is not to say you need to have professional quality work as an entry-level applicant, but an employer needs to be able to look at your work and make a connection to what they need done. If you want to work in consumer electronics, you probably won’t get a response unless you have some of that in your portfolio.
If you see a big gap between your body of work and the work you want to do, steer your work in that direction. You can likely reframe your existing projects to be more relevant. You can also do some personal projects to fill the gap. Don’t copy, but don’t be afraid to be too close to what your target companies do. Your goal is to demonstrate relevance.
Another tip is to look at the designers who already work there and look at their portfolios. Just search for them on LinkedIn, and if their portfolio isn’t right there, then Google their names + design. How does your work compare?
For me, I knew I wanted to be in design consulting. I looked at the top firms and saw they did all kinds of work and they had really slick renderings. I spent a lot of time applying visual polish and re-doing renderings of my work. I emphasized variety in my portfolio.
Be employer-friendly
It can be helpful to think of your job search as a design project of its own. You are the product, and the employer is the user.
What are their needs?
How can you best show your value?
How can you make it easy for them to interact with you?
Generally every employer’s needs include:
High quality, relevant work
“I need someone who can work on our kinds of projects.”
“I need someone who is either already producing the quality of work we need, or shows enough potential so I know they can get there with some training.”
Efficient hiring process
“I want to spend as little time as possible evaluating high quality candidates, so I can get back to designing.”
Good communication
“I need to get a sense that this person and I will work well together.”
That’s a pretty short, general list. Think about what your potential employer’s more specific needs might be.
Once you’ve identified your potential employer’s needs, put everything you do through the lens of employer-friendly and employer-hostile actions.
Employer-hostile:
A portfolio with slick personal branding and a cool layout but is hard to navigate, with unnecessary password protected areas everywhere
Applying with work that is clearly not relevant
Making them dig around your website for your resume
Not responding until days later
Telling them you want a job because you want to live where they’re located
Seriously, this is like Apple trying to sell you an iPhone by telling you how much money they’ll make from the sale (a lot).
Employer-friendly:
A simple, easy-to-navigate portfolio with highly relevant work
Including all the requested materials in the application email (resume, portfolio, cover letter)
Responding promptly (at least within a day)
Immediately communicating what value you can bring from the first email
That last point, communicating your value, is something you should think about throughout your whole portfolio and job search process. If you’re a new grad, having been in an academic environment for years, it’s natural to think of your work in an academic frame.
A lot of portfolios have sections like “sketches” or “CAD” or “explorations from X class”. This is how your work was structured in school, but not how employers think about design.
These aren’t inherently bad, but if you don’t provide context or clearly articulate why this material is relevant and valuable to a potential employer, you are asking them to do the mental work of mapping your student work onto their professional needs. They may or may not see the value.
Make you and your work as employer-friendly as possible, and you greatly increase the chances of getting a response and an interview.
Tell an engaging story with less
Most portfolios have too much of everything. Too many projects. Too many images. Too many charts and graphs. Too much personal branding. Way too much text.
As Dieter Rams says, “Less, but better”.
The goal of your portfolio isn’t to firehose your audience with all your work and every detail about the design process. It’s to showcase your most relevant, compelling work. It’s to hook your audience and then tell them an engaging story about each project.
First, look at your work and ask yourself what you’re most proud of. Show those projects. Are there things that no longer reflects your current abilities? Cut it or level it up.
Keeping lower quality, less-than-relevant work in your portfolio is actually muddying the waters and making your value less clear. 3 meaty projects and 3 smaller ones is probably enough.
Now look at each project and find the narrative thread. How did you get from the initial design problem to the final solution? What were the key insights you took forward at each stage? Challenge yourself to show as little as possible while still communicating a clear narrative. Show too much and you risk overwhelming the viewer.
By all means, show wide explorations and things that didn’t work out, but make it explicitly clear how this informed your process and moved the narrative forward.
Think of yourself as a movie director and your portfolio as your feature-length film. You might have thousands of hours of raw footage, but only about two hours makes it to the big screen. Some of it is still interesting and good for the DVD extras (save it for the interview), but a lot of it is going to end up on the cutting room floor.
Use as little text as possible. Most UI/UX designers will tell you, people don’t read. Make your pictures do the talking. Emphasize some key points, but do not rely on the text to carry the story.
Now test your story on people. Show your friends (designers and non-designers). Do people get what you’re saying without you having to explain it? Do they find it interesting? If not, go back and refine how you’re telling it.
Increase your surface area
In the age of the internet, the best thing you can do for your career is to increase your surface area for people to interact with you.
At the risk of beating a very dead horse: it’s not what you know. It’s who you know. The more people know you and your work, the more likely they will be to take a chance on hiring you.
First, read Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon. This book makes a much better case than I ever could for getting out there and sharing your work.
Next, if you don’t have one already, make a website. As Austin Kleon puts it in the book, if it’s not on the internet it doesn’t exist. This is a little corner of the internet that YOU can own. That’s pretty cool. But it also shows you are serious about your career and you have put effort into presenting yourself.
Portfolio sites like Behance and Coroflot are good too, but in my opinion you don’t want to rely on those as your exclusive web presence. Having a website with your work and a good about me section says, “I’m here, and I’m open for business”.
Now start sharing your work on your website blog, social media, whatever. If you’re a student, there’s no better time to document your learnings and show your design process while you’re not bound by various non-disclosure agreements.
There is an idea called “building in public” that has become popular on the internet. People just share their process of doing what they’re doing. Turns out, other people love to see how the sausage is made and learn from it. You can do that too!
It takes some time and effort, but it will pay off. You never know when what you’re doing will resonate with someone who’s hiring.
Finally, be active in the community. Go to IDSA events, talk to people, engage with the ID community on LinkedIn and Instagram. Not only will you learn a lot, but you may make a connection that might lead to your next job. Reach out to people. You’ll be surprised how many people are happy to talk to you.
Don’t approach every interaction as if it is going to lead to a job, and definitely don’t feel entitled to anything just because you have had two conversations with someone. Express genuine interest in people and what they do, and you’ll find yourself making professional and personal connections.
P.S. Don’t give up! (really!)
It can be very difficult looking for your first design job. Not hearing back and not knowing how to improve can be a huge discouraging factor. Try not to attribute anything to malice. Most design professionals are just incredibly busy and cannot respond to everyone.
Finding a job has a lot to do with timing and luck. If you don’t succeed at first, try again. At least a few of the designers I’ve been involved in hiring were not hired the first time they applied. Seeing a familiar name show up again actually tells the employer you’re serious and persistent and might give you a leg up.
Lastly, don’t be too attached to your first job. Your first job gets your foot in the door. Once you are in the industry, you can continue to work on your portfolio and pivot towards the work you want to do next. Don’t be afraid to take a tangential job like research or UI/UX to start your career journey. There’s plenty of time to get where you want to go.
I hope this has been helpful to someone. If you’re a student, did the advice above resonate with you? Was it actionable? If you’re a design professional, do you agree or disagree with the advice I’ve given?
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Thanks to Ayako Takase, Henry James, Tim Hulford, Steve Flanagan for contributing some of the ideas that are discussed in this piece.
Special thanks to Ayako Takase and Cutter Hutton for giving me my first job. I wouldn’t be writing this piece without them.