A portfolio website that gets you hired shows three to five of your best projects as short case studies, says plainly what you did on each one, and makes contacting you effortless. AI can build and publish the site in an afternoon. The part that wins interviews is still yours: choosing the work, telling its story honestly and showing real evidence.
When anyone can generate a polished site in an hour, polish stops being a signal. Specifics are. Here is what reviewers look for, a structure and a case study template, and how to publish on your own domain.
- Show three to five projects as case studies, not a wall of thumbnails. Reviewers skim, so lead with your best.
- Every case study answers five questions: what was the problem, what was your part, what did you do, what changed, and what did you learn.
- Let AI interview you and draft the text, then rewrite it in your voice and check every claim.
- Use real screenshots, sketches and photos of your process. Generated images read as filler.
- Put it on a domain with your name, test it on a phone, and link it from every application.
What reviewers look for in a portfolio website
Picture the reviewer. They have a stack of applications and a few minutes for yours. They open your home page, click one project, skim it, and look for two things: what you personally did, and whether it worked.
Nielsen Norman Group asked 204 people who hire for UX roles what they want from portfolios. Its advice (from 2019, and still sound) is to show three to five projects as detailed case studies: the problem, your role, how you reached the solution, the results, and the ideas you rejected along the way. Reviewers have little time for each portfolio, so it must be easy to scan.
That holds well beyond design. A developer, writer, marketer or analyst gets judged the same way. Short on projects? Build one or two from our list of AI side project ideas and write them up honestly.
| Reviewers look for | What it looks like on the page |
|---|---|
| Relevance | Projects close to the job you want, placed first |
| Your part | “I designed the onboarding flow and ran five user tests”, not “we built an app” |
| Your thinking | The constraints, the options you weighed, and why you chose one |
| Results | What changed afterwards, with numbers only if they are real |
| Craft | A site that loads fast, reads well and has no broken links, because the site is a work sample too |
The structure that works
Keep the site small and one click deep. Every extra page is a page a reviewer might land on instead of your best work.
Home. One line about who you are and the job you want, then your projects as large cards with a one-sentence outcome each.
One page per case study. The heart of the site. The template is below.
About. A short, human paragraph, a real photo, and the kind of work you want next.
Contact. An email link that works, plus LinkedIn, GitHub, Dribbble or whatever your field uses.
Resume. A current PDF, linked from the header.
Skip the skill bars (“JavaScript 85%”), the wall of tool logos and the blog you last updated two years ago. None of them answer the reviewer’s two questions.
A case study template you can fill in
Copy this outline for each project. A reviewer should get the gist from the headings alone.
# [Outcome-first title, e.g. "Cutting checkout drop-off for a small online shop"]
**Role:** [your title and what you owned] **Team:** [who else] **Time:** [weeks or months]
## The problem
[Two or three sentences: who had the problem, why it mattered, what was at stake.]
## My part
[What you personally did. Use "I" for your work and "we" for the team's.]
## What I did
[Three to five steps, each with one image: research, sketches, drafts, the build.]
## Key decisions
[One or two forks in the road: the options, what you chose and why. Include one idea you rejected.]
## The result
[What changed. Real numbers if you have them, observable changes if you do not.]
## What I would do differently
[One honest sentence. Reviewers read it as maturity, not weakness.]The last section matters more than it looks. It shows you can judge your own work, which is much of what a senior colleague does all day.
Let AI interview you, then rewrite in your voice
The hardest part of a case study is remembering what you actually did. AI is good at drawing it out of you. Paste your notes or old briefs, then use this prompt.
I am writing a portfolio case study about [project]. My target job is [role]. Interview me one question at a time to fill in: the problem, my exact role, the steps I took, one key decision and the options I rejected, the result, and what I would do differently. Push back when my answer is vague: ask for a specific example, a number, or a before and after. When we are done, draft the case study using the template I paste below. Use only facts I gave you. Mark anything you are unsure about with [CHECK].
Then do the part AI cannot do for you. Rewrite the draft so it sounds like you talking to a colleague. Cut the words that make readers suspect a machine: “passionate”, “leveraged”, “spearheaded”, “robust”. Replace every adjective with a fact.
Be strict with numbers. If you write that sign-ups rose 32%, expect to explain in an interview how that was measured. If you have no metric, describe the change you saw: support tickets about exports stopped, or two other teams adopted your component.
Visuals that do not look generated
Glossy AI imagery tells a reviewer nothing about you. The images that persuade are evidence: the actual thing you made, and the mess that led to it.
Real screenshots, cropped to the part that matters, with a caption that says what to notice.
Before and after pairs. Nothing explains a redesign or a refactor faster.
Process artifacts: sketches, whiteboard photos, a user-flow diagram, a pull request, a test report.
A real photo of you on the About page. A generated headshot is a small lie at the top of the page.
Use AI for the chores instead: resizing, clean device frames around your own screenshots, first drafts of alt text, a quiet background pattern. Keep images light (WebP or AVIF, sized to how they display), so the site stays fast on a phone.
Build and publish your portfolio with AI
Once the words and images exist, the site is the quick part. Our guide to building a website with AI in an afternoon covers the brief and how to avoid a generic design. For a portfolio, the steps are these.
Write the case studies first
Finish the text and gather the images before you prompt anything. A builder given real content produces a real site. Given “portfolio for a designer”, it produces the site everyone else has.
Pick how you will build it
An AI website builder is the fastest start. A coding agent gives you plain files that you own and can host anywhere. GitHub Pages serves a static site straight from a repository, at an address like
yourname.github.io, within limits such as a 1 GB site size.Brief the AI like a designer
Give it your content, one or two portfolios you admire and why, and your colors and fonts if you have them. Borrow their principles, not their pixels; our guide to recreating a design you love shows where the line sits. Add hard rules: fast on phones, readable text sizes, visible keyboard focus, alt text on every image.
Check it on a phone
Open every page on a real phone and tap every link, including the email link. Then run Lighthouse from Chrome’s developer tools and fix what it flags under accessibility and performance.
Put it on your own domain
A domain with your name is easy to remember and survives a change of host. Our guide to connecting a custom domain explains the DNS records in plain English.
Share it where reviewers will look
Put the link at the top of your resume, on your LinkedIn profile and in every application. Keep it open in interviews too, because you will often be asked to walk through one project.
For the rest of the application, including tailoring a resume without sounding like everyone else, see how to use AI in your job search.
Before you send the link
FAQ
How many projects should a portfolio have?
Three to five, shown as case studies. That is Nielsen Norman Group’s advice for design portfolios, and it works in every field. A reviewer who sees your three best projects forms a better opinion than one who scrolls past twenty.
Is it OK to use AI to write my portfolio?
Yes, as long as every claim is true and you can talk through every line in an interview. Use AI to interview you, structure the story and tighten the prose. Then rewrite it in your own voice, because reviewers read many portfolios and notice the generic ones.
What if all my work is under NDA?
Ask your employer or client what you may show. You can often describe the problem and your process without the confidential details, blur sensitive data, or rebuild the design with new branding. A self-initiated project, clearly labeled as one, also works.
Do I need a custom domain for a portfolio?
No, but it helps. A domain with your name is easy to remember, looks deliberate and keeps working if you switch hosts.
- Reviewers skim, so show three to five projects as case studies, best first.
- Every case study answers the problem, your role, what you did, what changed and what you learned.
- Let AI interview you and draft, then rewrite in your voice and verify every claim.
- Real screenshots and process artifacts beat generated images.
Next, make your home page work harder with a landing page that converts, or see every step of going live in how to put a website online.
- 5 steps to creating a UX-design portfolio, Nielsen Norman Group, August 2019
- What is GitHub Pages?, GitHub Docs
- GitHub Pages limits, GitHub Docs
