i have to disagree here. this is a terrible conversation brought on by Spool's ambiguous phrasing and the inability to draw context from 140 characters.

Jmspool wasn't clear enough in his original tweet and only if you read through he thread enough do you see what he meant. Unfortunately, his lack clarity in the first tweet created this mess.

Brijanp took the radical side of things and when you read through his tread, he admits that he only has a basic site with links.

Observations:

1. I really hate how a lot of trendy designers say stuff like "stop watching X and do a portfolio"... when 90% of them in other tweets talk about work/life balance and spending time with family or doing stuff outside.. Who are these people to decide what type of downtime is acceptable and what isn't? So spending time with my baby girl means I have no problem solving skills? I don't think so. I'll take watching my girl learn to walk or reading Harry Potter to my son over working on a portfolio EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

2. Our definition of a portfolio is radically different to different people. Some people define it as a basic template with recent work, some links, and contact info. Others see it as a full immersive website with multiple case studies that take 30 minutes each to read through. Heck, one great award-winning designer I know simply maintains a clean PDF and tells people to reach out to see his work samples. Others do nothing but post Dribbble shots.

In the end, the focus needs to be less about the word "portfolio" and more about the word "presence". Do you have an online presence that supports and showcases a small taste of what you do? Do you have a way for people to reach out and ask for more?

Personally, I prefer the basic side of things... and then when I go to people in person I custom build a slideshow of work I feel is relevant to their needs and show it them. I am making a pitch for myself. In this scenario I'm sometimes also able to show bits of some work that I can't publicly show (NDA's yo).

In the end, they key is that you need something online that gives a taste of who you are and what you do. THAT is a basic requirement. How deep/crazy/wild you want to go after that is completely up to you.... and for various roles, one type of "portfolio" may be better than another.

It's like we hit an existential designer nerve.

stop this. please.

The cringe is intensifying with every post on this website that contains a "should" in its title. Stop this.

Designers should stop being ruled by other peoples subjective opinion of what they should or should not be. Those people have acquired a following for whatever reason and now they treat it irresponsibly.

Every time someone says, "People should ..." they are implicitly or explicitly excluding people, as a way to differentiate themselves - as a way to feel special and elitist. This is pathetic.

Stop believing that you are the enlightened buddha just because you push pixels up and down, or because you write immediately invoked function expressions, or because you copied a trend, or because that stupid nike shoe that is on a white card with 15px border-radius gets 500 likes on dribbble.

Design is a job. A JOB. There is a craft involved, but guess what? So is making tables, cooking, architecture, gardening, etc. People are elevating their job titles to a level that makes them feel special, entitled, "one of them".

This is why I don't like to call myself designer anymore. It implies something that I am not.

"The best designers don't have portfolios. Too busy." Well guess what, the best User Experience Professionals usually provide a User Experience that DELIGHTS THEIR TARGET AUDIENCE.

THIS. DOES. NOT. DELIGHT. ME.

It isn't even responsive. WTF.

I don't want to start hating on a person, that feels like wasted energy and the person doesn't deserve it. But don't shame other people if the very craft you are trying to gatekeep is poorly executed by almost every standard yourself.

This makes me so unbelievably angry. As my description says, I can be mean sometimes, sorry.

What constitutes a portfolio?

Does a successful designer need to have an online presence with an online portfolio? Absolutely not.

Does a successful designer need to be prepared with work to show for an interview? Absolutely!

But that doesn't mean they need to have their work public for the world to see. If a company requires that, I find that ridiculous. And some people actually prefer anonymity. Believe it or not, some people just want to do good work and don't need the likes, loves, and favs from every social media channel.

Bit harsh from Brijan to say that you can't solve problems if you don't have a portfolio.

Don't you all have work to do? Lol. Just do what you need to do to get the job, or if you're hiring, to get the right employee. Who cares about generalizations and what other people think; in the end, folks gotta think for themselves. Now can we get back to more important things, like making cool shit?

This again is treating the designer as the other, where this profession transcends the laws of physics and gets its own special snowflake rulebook.

As someone who recently searched for a job relentlessly for the past month. YES you need a portfolio. Whether it's a site or an offline portfolio on drive or dropbox. Yes you need one. Some jobs refuse to even consider you without it.

Despite having one you'll still have a design exercise that you'll need to complete with the company to show competency and how you work through your problems and their teams.

The important thing to note about that entire Twitter storm isn't that Good Designers, or that Designers in general shouldn't have portfolios. It's that a Designer's portfolio is often their very public projects instead of a static write-up on their website.

And which path you decide to go depends on what projects you work on, and how you can communicate your work. Can you point to Facebook, and explain that you were the Principal Designer of the Event's app? Or is your work an internal company tool where a write-up is necessary to be able to show anything?

Personally, I think that even if you are well-known, and your work is everywhere that you should still have a portfolio of some sort that communicates how you thought through, and made the decisions you did in your designs.

If you're applying for a job you need to show how you can design and solve problems. Whether that's in the form of a portfolio or simply walking people through live projects it shouldn't matter.

Nobody is going to blindly hire you without seeing anything you've worked on.

If you want to get an interview these days, most of the time the answer is yes. The definition of a portfolio however, can vary greatly. As long as you can show that you've done design work you're good. If you're lucky enough to come across a company that is willing to give you a chance to show how you work by having you come work for a day or few, congrats. You've found a good one (probably).

It seems that the issue Jared is talking about is online application forms having a required field for a single "portfolio" url. Which I agree is really frustrating.

Somehow people took his comments to mean that you shouldn't ask a potential design hire to walk through or discuss in some way their previous work. I don't think Jared has any issue with having a candidate walk through work. The issue is when not having a single url is a complete show stopper for most companies. As Jared pointed out, if you enforce this single url you are probably going to loose out on some great talent.

Given the option of working on cool projects, or creating a portfolio I will choose the former. I'm happy to walk through my projects, but spending time making a beautiful, well thought out portfolio seems like a waste of time.

Also a lot of my work is work I don't own, and not publicly available (lots of designers are under NDAs or work as a in house designer). I can't put that work on a public portfolio. I can show it in private in an interview, but if you require me to submit a single url it's really tough to get that far.

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Perhaps designers don't need a resume either, because it's the same thing.

It's probably better to have one... in some form. I just finished mine: http://nenadmilosevic.co :)

I got hired at a pretty well known agency in Amsterdam without a portfolio website. I just sent them some work in a zip and got hired so it's definitly possible to get a job without

I think a designer must have a dribbble profile at least. I had barely created my own portfolio recent days but dribbble is quite good to remain updated. I don't recommend strongly to have a portfolio either because i'm still not satisfied from my personal portfolio and the works in it.

Busy designer not always have time for portfolio.

Question everything.

There two forms of obesity taking place here that are more related than they think.

It depends if they need one or not.

This conversation seems silly to me. I think Jim is right—there's more to this idea than Spool was able to communicate in his tweet.

I don't think product designers need a portfolio. However, they do need to have a way to show problems they've worked on and be able to explain how they arrived at a solution.

Here are a few things that I think work as a substitute:

• Links to previous projects with a blurb about what feature you worked on (if publicly available).
• Links to prototypes
• A video walking through a feature in Sketch/Photoshop and explaining how you arrived at a certain design.

Having a portfolio is probably more beneficial for younger designers. How long you've worked and how many project you've worked on is definitely a factor.

For what it's worth, I don't actively maintain a portfolio.

You probably don't need a conventional portfolio if you designed something popular that is being used every day. However, you would still need to have a list of links to direct people that might not know about it.