5 tips for making your content design portfolio presentation stand out

This isn't the time to be humble

As content designers, we know our way around words. Yet I’m often surprised by just how bad we are at promoting ourselves. Whether it’s amplifying our work or creating stellar portfolio presentations to land our next gig, content designers tend to shy away from tooting our own horns. Humility may be a virtue in some contexts, but it doesn’t serve us well when it comes to our careers.

Photo by Good Faces on Unsplash

Given the massive layoffs in tech, the job market is saturated with outstanding talent. Frankly, anyone who is hiring right now has dream candidates lining up at their door. This kind of talent glut can be disheartening but it’s never been more important to make sure your portfolio presentation is buttoned up. This is your chance to introduce yourself to the hiring manager and it sets the stage for your loop.

Throughout my career, I’ve participated in hundreds of loops. While at Meta alone, there were many weeks when I interviewed three or four people.

Here are five things I’ve taken away from all of those portfolio presentations.

1. Words matter, but they aren’t what wow me. If you’re interviewing for a content design role, it’s because I expect that you can write coherent copy. That’s the minimum requirement. I want to see how you approach your work. What questions do you ask? Who do you collaborate with? How do you use research and data to shape your content design? The portfolio presentation is your chance to walk me through your thought process and understand the way you work, and that’s the single most important thing I need to know.

2. Show me the impact of your work. Content quality can be subjective if we’re just talking about words on a screen. How do you know you’ve created quality content design? How do you measure user understanding? How do you know the impact content makes in the experience? Do you assume content is good if it ships or do you engage in rigorous testing and leverage data to determine quality? You can write the loveliest sentence in the world but if users are confused, it’s bad content. Show me how you measure impact even if your organization doesn’t have metrics at the ready. Do you engage in user testing? A/B testing? Articulate how you prove the impact of your work.

3. Tell the story of your work as a product owner. Content designers design experiences with information and often that means significantly influencing the product strategy and user experience. I’m always looking for examples of specific instances where content designers influenced their partners to change course or try a new approach. Some of the best content designers I’ve worked with pitched new features that became the organization’s P0 for the half and led to massive metrics wins. Content designers are part of the product team and should be able to identify products they’ve influenced.

4. Prove you can prioritize. Content designers often want to help everyone. They end up caught on the hamster wheel of copywriting and struggle to engage as designers as a result. When I see a content designer explain how they said no, what they used to determine prioritization and how they negotiated these discussions with their partners, I know that they’ll be able to have more impact simply because they know when and how to say no.

5. Show me who you are. Every team has a working style and it’s important that we hire someone who can work within that while also pushing us forward. Do you have a passion for DEI? Are you an accessibility or localization champion? Are you passionate about standards or mentorship? Do you love to plan morale events and always have ideas for bringing us closer together? Show me what unique value you can bring to our team and our broader organization.

And for the love of god, manage your time. Practice your presentation. Make sure you can hit everything in the time allotted. I’ll take one really well presented work example over four rushed through examples that don’t connect the dots.