What hiring managers look for in a design portfolio is not a bigger pile of pretty screens — it’s a clear problem, your exact role, the choices you made under pressure, and proof the work held up once it shipped.
I sent $90 to India with Xe to repay a friend’s customs bill. Xe took the money, cancelled the transfer, closed my account and won’t say why. Documented.
A Revolut transfer declined four times over a ₹8,435 customs reimbursement for a phone I gifted a friend in Hyderabad — about €80 a try. The full story, attempt by attempt.
Paul Rand IBM logo design turned three heavy letters into eight clean stripes in 1972, and the mark has barely had to change since — which is precisely why it still works.
Jacob Lawrence was 23, had never painted a single large canvas of the Great Migration, and instead split it into 60 small tempera panels with captions — a decision that rewired what history painting could be.
Parasite’s Park house was never a house at all – production designer Lee Ha-jun built it around camera moves, sunlight and a 2.35:1 window, and that backwards way of designing has lessons well beyond film.
