1. A niche costs you some jobs and buys you interviews
There are far more designers than design jobs right now, so every opening pulls in a pile of applicants and companies can afford to filter hard. Of all the ways to stand out from that pile, niching down is the one we talk about most. Nate’s deliberately extreme example was a lead designer who only builds websites for kids’ dentists. When a kids’ dentist needs a site, they find you, and you’ve got a real shot at the job. The catch is that you’re no longer well placed for anything else.
The instinct is to generalize again so you can apply to more roles. But the portfolio’s job is to get interviews, and the number of jobs you’re eligible for doesn’t measure that. Pick a craft and an industry and build your pitch around the two. The list of jobs gets shorter, but the interviews should go up, because you stop getting filtered out. Go much deeper and interviews start to dry up, though the few you land are likely to turn into offers, since hardly anyone competing for them can match you. You’re looking for the balance point: deep enough to set you apart, broad enough to keep the interviews coming.
A niche isn’t your forever home, either. With an experienced designer who wanted to move into new industries, Tim’s advice was to break past work down into the skills underneath it and repackage them. His example was healthcare, where privacy and compliance shape the work, so if you’ve designed for safety and assurance, that story moves over. Your portfolio isn’t a background check of everywhere you’ve been. If you want two niches at once, Nate’s answer is a second version of your brand for the second one. Either way, list the problems designers in your target industry deal with, then lead with the work of yours that overlaps.
2. Write the case study for someone who skims
Recruiters and hiring managers don’t read case studies. They open one, scroll, stop on a section that catches them, then go back to scrolling. So length isn’t really the problem — Nate likes a longer case study. The question is whether yours still works for someone who only sees the headings and the images.
Nate’s model is a children’s picture book: a couple of sentences, then an image, then a couple more. Images get understood fast, even mid-scroll. His test for headings is to delete all the body copy and read what’s left. Can you still follow the story? Tim was tougher on headings than Nate. A heading like “Context” or one written as a teaser makes the reader dig for the point. Say what the problem actually was, or what you gave up and how you knew it was worth it.
Two more things came up. With no impact section, a case study tends to read mid-level, since showing how you knew it worked is often what moves a reviewer to senior. And anything tucked behind a hover state or a before/after toggle is easy to miss, because people skimming don’t stop to interact. Show every state in the scroll and close with impact. If you do include a before, Tim’s habit is to set it right beside its after, in a small section of its own.
3. A bullet that only names an activity is fluff
A recent graduate brought a resume that was already in good shape, so this was tuning more than fixing. Most of the bullets shared one flaw. Each described something UX designers do, like mapping and redesigning user flows, and none said why it mattered. The fix Nate pointed to is the XYZ formula: you accomplished X, as measured by Y, by doing Z. Force every bullet into that shape and you can’t write a weak one.
The obvious objection came next: the work never shipped, so there are no numbers. Tim’s answer is that you don’t need metrics. You need to show value. A line saying you redesigned some user flows asks the reviewer to judge whether that was good, and they have nothing to judge it with. So connect the dots for them. Why was it better for users? Why is that good for the product, and why is that good for the business?
If you don’t have hard numbers, estimate the reach. Roughly how many people go through that flow in a month, and what happens there? Do they convert? Do they churn? You don’t have to claim a sale happened because of your design. You do need to say roughly what the change was worth. And if cutting your summary leaves white space, don’t pad it. Spend it on the bullets that undersell you most — Tim pointed at six months of work squeezed into two sentences.
4. If you don’t frame the site, the reviewer will
Tim gives a portfolio two jobs: introduce you, then show why you solve the visitor’s problem. One designer had rebuilt their site around craft and personality, and it was lovely. It also pointed two ways at once, with illustration up front and product UI behind it, and nothing that said who they were or what they do. On a call, they’d explain every piece of it. But people browse alone, with no one to walk them through, so the site has to do the explaining.
Nate’s line from marketing school is that positioning means owning a perception in someone’s mind. His own site sits at the narrow end. It targets one industry and one kind of team, and its plain, almost sterile look is part of that choice. That’s also why we told an earlier candidate not to worry that their minimal site looked boring. Boring is fine when it suits who you’re targeting. A site that’s too broad gives a reviewer nothing to measure it against. This designer actually said a good one-line pitch out loud during the review. It just wasn’t on the site.
When you leave the frame out, reviewers write their own. Later we did a blind read of another portfolio. Results-first case study titles pushed Nate toward senior, then screens with no visible process pulled him to “senior UI designer,” for someone aiming at product roles. The label had nothing to do with the quality of the UI. He defaulted to UI because he couldn’t see the UX or business thinking, and the candidate had done that work. Put your one-line pitch in the hero and tell people what each image shows and why it matters. If two kinds of work pull your site in different directions, be ready to pick one: Tim’s point was that positioning is also about what you leave off.
5. No interviews? Look at your resume before your portfolio
The last review started with plenty of portfolio traffic and no interview calls, and the candidate’s read was that the portfolio must be the problem. So Tim drew the hiring pipeline. An application goes to an ATS, then a recruiter, then often an HR or project person, then a team lead, and sometimes on to other teams and an executive. The ATS and the recruiter only see your resume and the job description. Your portfolio first gets a look at the HR stage, and the team lead is the one who skips the resume and goes straight to it.
The steepest drop is at the very start, where the resume is all anyone sees. If you’re applying and not hearing back, the likely culprit is your resume and how well you fit the job description. Redesigning the portfolio again and again in the hope of more interviews is usually the wrong use of your time. That time is better spent on the resume and on applying to more of the right roles. Be patient with the timeline too. The whole process can take 60 to 90 days, so if you only started applying recently, automated rejections from the ATS are about all you should expect so far.
None of this makes the portfolio unimportant. We say it constantly: strong writing can carry a mid design, and bad writing can’t. Good writing helps at every stage of that pipeline, well before anyone judges your visuals. If you only have time for one thing, spend it on the writing: your positioning and your story.
A few smaller things came up that are worth checking on your own materials. Credit yourself in the footer instead of the tools you built the site with, and put your resume and LinkedIn links at both the top and the bottom. A photo or a memorable line in the hero helps people remember you when they’re comparing a stack of candidates. On resumes, an all-caps or small-caps name, dot separators and labels like “Portfolio:” can trip up the parsers that auto-fill applications. Splitting one job into named sub-projects can make a reviewer think those were the only projects you did. We still lean toward cutting the summary, though Nate admitted he’s less sure than he used to be: if an AI tool is going to summarize your resume anyway, writing your own might steer it. Until anyone knows, cut it and use the space for real content. Call-outs that read as AI-written made Tim wonder whether the rest was worth reading. And keep applying in the background even once you have a job — we both do.