Hello, it’s Aneta here 👋 This is issue #13 of UX Design Express and today we’re talking about

Portfolio of a Freelance Product Designer

You’re probably wondering if there’s a difference between these two. Whether a Freelance Product Designer should have a different portfolio than a Full-time UX/Product Designer. So as you can guess, the answer is: it depends.

• 👩🏻‍💻 Do you work as a full-time UX Designer and take freelance jobs after hours?

• 🦄 Are you a Freelance Product Designer working independently?

• 👥 You’re a Freelance Product Designer who position yourself as a Design Agency?

A situation can also look different, if you not only offer UX design services but also brand design, design systems or web design. This is a very common case for many Freelance Product Designers.

Applying for a full-time UX position vs looking for individual clients also means targeting a different audience. This means that your portfolio will be reviewed by a different role, a different user group.

• 👤 UX Designer applying for a full-time UX position targets hiring managers, recruiters and designers

• 👤 Freelance Product Designer when looking for clients targets businesses that can be represented by CEOs, software engineers, product managers and sometimes designers

For all these cases you can approach creating your UX portfolio differently. You can be more strategic and craft your portfolio to a concrete user group to resonate more with their needs. However, if you’re in a specific situation, acting both as a full-time UX Designer and freelancer, what should you do?

Let’s dive in 🐬

Picking strategy for your freelance product designer’s portfolio

If you have read Blue Ocean Strategy, you know that strategy is all about trade-offs. That’s why I am showing you various options, content, perspectives and frameworks to craft your UX portfolio. In the context of a Freelance Product Design portfolio the key is to think about what information to highlight in your portfolio.

👩🏻‍💻 Full-time UX Designer that takes freelance jobs after hours

In this case being strategic is even more important because your time is tremendously limited. I know it because I did this shit for a few years and I know that it’s not easy. Thinking about your time limitations in this context gets even more important, hence it doesn’t make sense to create two different portfolios.

Focus on crafting one portfolio well. But, it would be good to know where you want to spend more time on - working full-time or doing freelance, and craft relevant portfolio to one of these roles. Usually, in this context it’s a full-time role, hence try to craft a proper portfolio for this and additionally, communicate that you take on freelance gigs.

🦄 Freelance Product Designer working independently

Working fully as a freelancer, you have a choice of crafting your portfolio as an individual or as a design agency. If you want to scale your business, it often makes sense to position yourself as a design agency. It can be also a good idea if you want to offer more services and collaborate with other freelancers.

But you’re probably wondering what’s the difference? The biggest difference is in positioning yourself as an individual or a team. Focusing on you as a design team of one makes sense if you want to create a more personal and human vibe of your portfolio. Whereas if you write your stories as a team, using “we” statements, this can give a bigger impression of being a business.

Content for a portfolio of an independent Freelance Product Designer

Working fully as a freelancer means that you can focus your portfolio content on targeting your business client. This user group often wants to know these 3 things from your portfolio:

1. how you can help them, meaning what type of services you offer

2. if you can deliver value to their business, meaning your experience and achievements

3. how they can work with you, meaning your pricing, processes, offer

Presenting your services

It’s key to clearly communicate what type of work you can do for your clients since every designer is different and has different expertise. You can’t expect your business clients to know what is UX, UI or Product Design. Especially, when even designers argue about it 😉

Highlighting your value

But rarely through long-form case studies because business clients often don’t have time and knowledge to evaluate them. The goal is to communicate your value as a designer quickly and easily so that a client can understand it without putting a lot of time and effort into reviewing your portfolio.

How can you highlight your value? By showing:

• Project summaries and design shots

• Your results and competitive advantage in numerical highlights

• Project sneak peeks - through shorter case studies, links to presentations or Figma

• Sharing testimonials

Pricing, process, offering

As I call this bucket, tiny formalities. It’s the next step after the first impression. If you position yourself as a design agency, a business, you can definitely think about including it in your portfolio. Clients want to know how they can work with you, what is in your offering, what is your competitive advantage and if they have budget for your pricing.

Additional information that freelance designers and agencies tend to include is about design shots, about page, contact or FAQ section.

Frame everything into a landing page

This is even more important when you’re a freelancer since your clients might be not as familiar with a designer’s portfolio as majority of hiring managers are. Your clients are probably not designers, hence, you need to put even more effort into crafting a clear communication so that they can easily make a decision if you could be their potential contractor.

How can you do it?

• Be clear who you target - corporate, startups or/and agencies? You can figure this out by selecting what problems you want to solve.

• Make your services and offering crystal clear - product design, websites or both?

• Know your process and pricing - project based, subscription or hourly pricing? how the communication will look like?

Then put it into a landing page. Focus on selling your value to your potential client.

That's it for today!

Get portfolio support from me ⭐️

There are 2 ways I can support you individually with your portfolio.

1. Let’s do it long-term! The biggest results come from this

2. Hop on a one-time call with me

I’m back in two Fridays with another edition of UX Design Express 👋

Keep designing ✨
Aneta