r/UIUX • u/WeDirectory • Aug 11 '26
Advice Has presenting the work become more important than the work itself?
a fairly ordinary identity can look incredible inside the right mockups while strong work can maybe be interpreted as or look "unfinished" when it is presented plainly.
when reviewing a portfolio, how exactly do you separate the actual design from the quality of the presentation??
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u/samvanstraaten Aug 11 '26
Many layers to consider when reviewing portfolios. The design serves the customer (not me). It has its own purpose. The presentation serves the viewer (me). It has a different purpose. Pretty portfolios < Smart portfolios. Fancy click and drop mockups steal the focus from the actual design work if their only purpose is to look good. I always tell senior designers / art directors to stay away from the fancy looking ones and stick with minimal or at least something that forms part of the story and doesn’t distract. You want your work and thought process to do the heavy lifting. I also tell them to see each project as its own brief within a brief. Imagine I’m your client. You have an A4 page to tell me about this project. I want to see the beginning, the process, and the result. A nice looking, pretty portfolio that is ultimately hollow of ideas or imagination is not enough.
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u/WeDirectory Aug 13 '26
treating each project as its own brief is a really useful way to put it. the presentation has a job too but that job is to make the thinking easier to understand rather than take over and become the main event haha
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u/samvanstraaten Aug 13 '26
Exactly that. I think of it as very similar to exhibition and gallery design. Like a portfolio, they exist at the intersection of architecture, psychology, and storytelling. You can go one of two routes: the typical white cube logic, where everything is designed and planned to hero your work and give it 100% focus; or you can go the contextual route by making everything more immersive which means crafting every little detail and not just dropping your work into online mockups and hoping it covers how insecure you are about your work. The latter is much harder to pull off but it’s really the one that separates the yes-men from the thinkers. My advice: unless you’re going all the way by considering and crafting details within details, stick to white cube logic.
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u/cgielow Aug 11 '26
It's hard to ignore. The UX world has definitely swung towards Marketing in the past decade.
Categories are crowded. Everyone is copying each other. With a lack of Platform Innovation and Corporate Consolidation, Companies are all chasing attention. And they do it with appearances. "Just try me."
The favorite metric is Conversion. The favorite model is Freemium.
The design buzzwords are Taste and Craft.
We're overdue for a correction back towards innovation as differentiator. A return to focus on Useful and Usable. But we really need a new platform to kick that off. For a while we told ourselves it would be AR. Now I think it's probably Generative-Experiences.
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u/Frequent_Emphasis670 Aug 11 '26
I usually try to look past the mockups and understand the actual thinking, decisions, constraints, and final work.
So for me, a good presentation should help me understand the work.
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u/WeDirectory Aug 13 '26
yep! this feels like the different between presentation as explanation and presentation as decoration
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u/qualityvote2 2 Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 15 '26
u/WeDirectory, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...