After 5 Years in UI/UX, I’m Finally Designing My Portfolio

After five years of working in UI/UX design, I finally decided to build my own portfolio.

Not because I suddenly need somewhere to display screenshots of my work.

I want a portfolio that actually works for me.

My primary goal is to use it to pitch freelance clients. But I also know that recruiters, designers, founders, and other people may eventually land on the same website.

So before opening Figma and designing the homepage, I started treating my portfolio like any other UX project.

First, I Defined What the Portfolio Needs to Do

The primary audience is potential freelance clients.

When someone lands on the website, they should quickly understand:

Who am I? What do I design? What problems can I solve? What have I already worked on? How can they work with me?

But there is a secondary audience: recruiters.

If a recruiter discovers my portfolio, I don’t want to force them through a freelance-focused experience.

They should still be able to:

• Understand my experience quickly
• Explore my work
• View my resume
• Download my resume
• Contact me

That immediately changed the way I started thinking about the information architecture.

The portfolio isn’t just a gallery.

It has multiple users with different intentions.

My Initial User Personas

I simplified the users into two groups.

1. The Designer -> Me

My goal is to maintain an accurate representation of my professional work.

I need to be able to update my experience, projects, resume, and availability without feeling like I’m rebuilding the website every few months.

Pain point: Traditional portfolios can become outdated quickly and make maintaining professional information unnecessarily difficult.

2. The Viewer

The viewer could be a client, recruiter, founder, or another designer.

Their goal is completely different.

They don’t want to explore my portfolio for 20 minutes just to understand what I do.

They want to evaluate me quickly.

Their journey should be closer to:

Land → Understand → Scan work → Build trust → Take action

Depending on who they are, that action might be:

Hire me. Contact me. View my resume. Download my resume.

I’m also exploring another direction: allowing someone to request help creating or improving their own resume.

That could eventually turn the portfolio from a static representation of my work into a small service ecosystem.

The Question I’m Designing Around

This gave me one important question:

What should someone understand about me within the first few seconds of landing on my portfolio?

I don’t want the homepage to simply say:

“Hi, I’m a UI/UX Designer.”

Technically, that’s true.

But it doesn’t tell a potential client why they should continue scrolling.

The homepage needs to communicate my positioning, experience, capabilities, personality, and value — without becoming crowded.

That balance is becoming one of the central design challenges.

I Also Want It to Feel Like Me

There’s another part of portfolio design that UX frameworks don’t completely capture.

Identity.

I love clean white spaces.

I love being a woman, and I don’t want my portfolio to feel like another generic minimalist designer website where personality has been removed in the name of professionalism.

At the same time, I don’t want femininity to become a visual gimmick.

So I’m thinking carefully about imagery.

Instead of filling the website with decorative graphics, I want visuals to reveal something about how I work.

That could mean a combination of:

Editorial portraits + interface details + process artifacts + typography + generous white space.

The work should remain the hero.

My personality should shape the atmosphere around it.

Step One: Portfolio Auditing

Before designing anything, I gave myself a simple exercise:

Audit at least two portfolio websites every day.

Not just save beautiful websites to an inspiration folder.

Actually audit them.

For every portfolio, I’m looking at questions like:

First impression: What do I understand within five seconds?

Positioning: Can I immediately tell what this designer does?

Hierarchy: Where does my eye go first?

Navigation: How quickly can I find their work, experience, resume, and contact information?

Case studies: How much information do they reveal before asking me to open a project?

Trust: What makes this person feel credible?

Conversion: Is there an obvious next action?

Personality: Does the website actually feel like a person, or could it belong to any designer?

Visual language: How are whitespace, typography, imagery, motion, and colour being used?

And most importantly:

What would I change?

That last question turns inspiration into design research.

I’m Not Designing Yet

This is probably the most interesting part.

Five years ago, I might have started by choosing fonts, creating a hero section, and looking for interesting interactions.

Now I’m deliberately avoiding that.

Because I don’t want to design a beautiful portfolio and then figure out what it needs to say.

I want to understand the users, journeys, content, positioning, and conversion goals first.

Then I’ll design the interface around them.

The portfolio itself is becoming a UX case study.

And I’m documenting the entire process — from research and competitive audits to information architecture, visual direction, case studies, prototyping, and eventually the final website.

Two portfolio audits a day is where I’m starting.

Let’s see where the research takes the design.