Stop Showing Every Project You’ve Ever Made

A designer once asked why her portfolio wasn’t landing interviews, despite having eighteen projects on it. The honest answer was that eighteen projects made it impossible to tell what she actually wanted to be hired to do. Half looked like a print designer, a third looked like a UI designer, and a few looked like neither.

A portfolio is a filter, not an archive. Every project you include is implicitly telling a visitor “give me more work like this.” If you want branding clients, showing five unrelated logo projects says more than fifteen mixed ones ever could — even if the fifteen are individually well made.

The practical move is to pick the direction you want your next project to come from, then cut anything that doesn’t support that story, no matter how proud you are of it. Old work that no longer represents where you’re going belongs in a private archive, not the homepage.