How to Read a Portfolio Like You're Hiring

You already know how to hire. You've done it for contractors, for employees, for the restaurant you bet a birthday on: look at the work, ask about the work, and watch how they talk about the work. A studio portfolio deserves exactly that level of skepticism, and almost never gets it.

Here's the reading list.

One. Look for range that's still recognizably them

Logo marks to full websites, different industries, different moods, and yet you can tell one person made all of it. A studio that can design a mark and a site thinks about your brand as a system. A studio with one trick will apply the trick to you and call the result a process.

Two. Read the labels

Honest studios label concept work as concept work. We do, everywhere. A studio that blurs "work we were paid for" and "work we invented to show range" will blur other things too, and you'll find out which ones on invoice day.

Three. Ask what they'd redo

Every good designer keeps a list of decisions they'd revisit. If the answer is "nothing," they're either lying or not looking, and neither one improves your project. The right answer sounds like "the third section, honestly, the photos were a compromise."

Four. Ask who owns the site when it's done

The right answer is: you do. Your hosting, your domain, your licenses, your login, from day one. A studio that hesitates on this question is a studio planning to keep something, and the thing they keep usually appreciates in cost.

Five. Look for thinking, not vibes

Pretty pictures are cheap; there has never been a moment when they were easier to make. So look for the unglamorous evidence of process: structure sketches, before-and-afters, rationales written in complete sentences, a price list they'll defend, annotations they'll show you. A portfolio that can't explain itself is a portfolio that doesn't know itself.

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Run those five on our work, if you like. The concept sites, the identities, the making-of page with the whole argument in it. And if you want a faster test, send us your current website and we'll show you how we read: request a redline, and the markup comes back marked by an actual person, free, before you've promised anyone anything.