How Not to Make A Design Portfolio for Mars Missions funded by Tomorrow’s Banks

Lift-off to Mars? Not quite. Today, I’m focusing on something just as crucial: updating my portfolio. And all of this content has been edited by ChatGPT and improved by it. In the design industry, your portfolio is your primary showcase for your work, and ideally, you should update it regularly. Unfortunately, I haven’t touched mine in over a year.

The challenge with portfolios is that often, some of your best work must remain confidential, preventing you from showcasing it. Additionally, as design professionals, we constantly evolve and must reflect that growth in our portfolios. The field of design is always changing, which is why I’m currently enrolled in a UI design class. Our project? Creating a user interface for banking applications. But true to my non-conformist spirit, I’m developing a UI for The First Time Bank of Mars.

Picture walking into an interview with your Martian banking UI. People will likely look at you as if you’re from another planet — not the whimsical cartoon kind, but something entirely different.

If you are going to do this — your portfolio should be affective. It should aim to do what MIT describes as computers that respond intelligently to natural human emotional feedback. So you designs should facilitate this response.

Complicating matters further, it’s vital to align your portfolio with the brand and needs of your prospective clients. This often comes up during interviews when asked about what you would change in your previous designs. It’s a tough question that requires vulnerability, as admitting imperfections means acknowledging that there’s room for improvement.

So the challenge is to create an aerospace emotion to the business endeavors of the common corporation? Yep.

Today marks a reckoning for how I understand this type of affective innovation. Here are some reflections:

• Innovation isn’t always about breakthroughs. New technologies can create as many issues as they resolve.
• Customers often articulate their needs, but technologists may misinterpret them. This misalignment can be detrimental.
• People tend to create processes to avoid directly addressing customer needs. How technologists engage with clients shapes their interactions and the products they create. Meet them where they are and abandon your process. Unlearn everything you know.

When updating my portfolio, I need to remember:

• Your portfolio should empower clients to ask and answer their own questions. Then, you must deliver based on those answers.
• Focus on what shouldn’t be done by being willing to go down the road they want to travel with your portfolio. Design is often about simulating possibilities at a lower cost than actual implementation. Rodin didn’t become a success by making what he wanted to make but by making what others wanted him to make.
• Aim to shift your clients’ moods with your portfolio.
• Embrace uncertainty, cautiously. Investigate the aspects of a business that are most ambiguous and understand why they need a designer.

Reflecting on my past experiences, I remember when I was eager to land a job at an online sports training company. I conducted heuristic evaluations and redesigned their platform prior to being hired, thinking this would make me a standout candidate. However, I was unaware they were undergoing an acquisition that would drastically change their product needs. Ultimately, their acquisition failed, and they returned to the very issues I had redesigned.

So, what’s the better mindset? Should I take satisfaction in being right or delve deeper into why I missed the acquisition signals? This introspection is vital for growth as a designer.

Here I am, eager to create a portfolio that demonstrates I’m precisely what a company needs. But therein lies my flaw: companies often don’t need designers per se; they need someone to translate their visions into tangible designs they feel comfortable rejecting.

It’s true we can’t always predict a company’s acquisition process or recognize the signs. Rather than criticize this dynamic, we should accept it and adapt.

This is starting to feel like a space mission, where unexpected challenges arise, and everyone must adapt. Take Boeing’s recent Starliner issues as a case in point: astronauts stranded, critical problems — real-world challenges. As the UX designer involved in this project, what would my response be?

Bringing this back to earth, my brand is Luna Charta, which translates to “moon mapping.” My target audience is in Richmond, VA. My work aims to address societal challenges that facilitate manned spaceflight to Mars.

Given all of this, let’s analyze my portfolio to identify its shortcomings:

• The browser entry field indicates “not secure.” That’s a critical failure before users even engage with the content.
• Beautiful imagery doesn’t relate to designing practical applications that drive successful products and services. It’s unconventional to a fault.
• Headings like “Design for Today and Tomorrow” aren’t what material reflections of successful conflicts over product vision. They should be fostering healthy tension. Our designs are not always the right answers to elusive questions. They can sometimes just be the well postulated questions that seemed elusive until the designer asked them.
• The resolution and cropping of my first design are subpar, and the spacing between elements is inconsistent. This needs significant improvement.
• My portfolio isn’t competitive with even the most basic AI. I’m not demonstrating my skills effectively; every visitor is essentially interviewing me and I’m failing fantastically.

Now, let’s examine one of my project pages.

While it may seem ambitious, it lacks outcomes that would genuinely benefit a major organization. Featuring an augmented reality headset and concepts to control the Hyperloop , I attempted to redesign human factors at ESA and NASA. But those organizations likely don’t need me to overhaul Mission Control; it’s functioning well.

Innovation often complicates things; we need small, incremental changes that seamlessly build upon existing designs.

Ultimately, I need to align my portfolio to ask great questions in a visual manner to the companies I am targeting.

This will be the subject of my next entry.