As we’re interviewing designers for our ever expanding team, Danika and I seem to come across the same thing time and time again - bad portfolios. Especially - bad student portfolios. The first thing I look at when someone e-mail’s their resume is their work. Its the most important factor for me when looking at a candidate. For a student fresh out of design school, I can appreciate various levels or experience and recognize when someone has potential. But if I can’t see their work, I can’t see their work.

When I was in design school one of the only web or interaction design class I had was an online portfolio class, where the teachers encouraged students to make a “creative” brand to pitch themselves online, and to build the whole site themselves. This often produced ill coded flash based websites that did anything but showcase the students work - after all we’re designers, not developers!

Fast forward to today - where resources like Indexhibit , Cargo Collective, or even Krop provide designers with a clean, simple solution to create a portfolio without knowing how to code or design for the web. It seems obvious to me that design students (especially ones without web or interactive experience) should be using these services now, as a tool for showcasing their work in the best light. Yet, all I see when going through applications are the same flash based sites that were made when I was in school that are more “site” then portfolio.

It seems obvious to me that teachers should stop forcing students to create their own sites from scratch, and spend more time focusing on whats important - their work. If students spent an entire semester finding a way to visually present their work in the best light, then their work would speak for itself. No need for a flashy, busy mess.

Every designer has something to gain from an online portfolio, and every designer today should have one. As a person on the opposite end of those portfolio, how the work is showcased is just as important as the work itself. So the question remains - when will teachers start teaching their students how to really show their work?