To whomphst it may concern,
I suspect you might be wondering where all the product design is for this so-called product designer. I want to take a second to clarify that you didn't miss it, you’re in the right place! My approach to design doesn’t differ whether I’m working on a form for a website or or a piece of lettering or yes, a deck of cards. I have lots of experience coding up CSS changes, reworking layouts, iterating on design solutions, prioritizing and advocating for user feedback, creating consistency in design systems, and refining user workflows, among other things.
I have all that experience, why show a deck of cards? A deck of cards has its own interface, its own carefully considered design system, and its own detailed execution down to the size of the dot fill in the custom lettering or the ink traps in the pip symbols. I can spend two years on a finely detailed project with loads of parts that needed to work together and support a pretty big underlying concept, but can also spend half a day in the browser web inspector cleaning up a page that’s shipping tomorrow and getting a quick PR out.
However, neither of these samples (nor anything I can simply display), can capture all the thoughtfulness that goes into the best product design. No images or case studies can really capture the collaboration and hard thinking that comprise 90% of the design job—really, drawing is the fastest part—and no portfolio can capture the one single hardest part of product design: talking to other people.
Real product design, real design worth anything, is made up of discussion and careful observation and working with people to address needs and talk through or wrestle ideas, the quality of the design execution is directly derived from the quality of those interactions; not from a designer in a vacuum as some glorified make-it-pretty-pixel-perfect-please-unicorn.
So, how the heck are you supposed to get an idea of me as a designer and what I can do with this weird-ass portfolio?
Welp, I guess we just have to talk.
Speak soon,
Shannon