Why We're Launching Dream Design Job

By Patrici @ Dream Design Job

April 1, 2021

We’ve all experienced the highs and lows of a job search.

It can be long and arduous, especially for young designers who may feel pressured to perform with polish and confidence during the inevitable Portfolio Review, as if they’re not a nervous wreck on the inside. Even for experienced designers, the Portfolio Review can be perplexing and uncomfortable.

If this sounds familiar, you are not alone.

When a designer’s main goal is to come across as capable and impressive, sometimes their first instinct is to fill up their deck with information. This gets the audience lost in the weeds of perfectionism and unnecessary detail.

Instead, what if the designer’s goal was to craft a compelling story around why their projects were so impactful and transformative?

This gets the audience riveted by emotion and makes your capabilities clear as day. We’ve all heard the adage that stories can change worlds, and change lives. This can literally be the case when it comes to making or breaking a job opportunity in design. But as designers, how do we tell a concise and compelling story?

Patrick and I learned from painful experience.

Our Story

We are friends and product designers based in the heart of the San Francisco tech world and have had our fair share of embarrassing failures in the Portfolio Review stage of design interviews. From watching people’s eyes glaze over mid-presentation, to getting shown the door before the interview day was done, we’ve been through it all before landing jobs we love.

But hey, examining and learning from these failures is what brought us here today, to share our next iteration of Dream Design Job with you!

We both wish we had early, tactical guidance on how to properly present our portfolio work to hiring teams, and founded Dream Design Job to provide others with this kind of practical storytelling confidence and insight.

After holding live workshops around design hiring since 2018, this week, we’re launching our first ever online course to be accessible to designers around the world.

We plan to optimize our offerings as we hone our brand and get feedback from you. Expect more helpful content around design hiring and job hunting.

For now, our only hope from the course is that you learn from our experience, and skip the extended emotional and mental toll of figuring out why your presentation isn't working! Happy interviewing.

-Patrick and Patrici