I've been thinking about how designers present their work, and I realized something: the traditional portfolio has become a museum. A carefully curated collection of "final" pieces, frozen in time, telling us what you can do—but not who you are or how you think.
Then I watched a designer friend use Jottings, and it clicked. She wasn't just sharing finished designs. She was building a living journal of her creative process, her insights, her evolution.
The Portfolio Problem Nobody Talks About
If you're a designer, you've probably wrestled with this: How do you show your best work without the pressure of perfection? Traditional portfolio sites like Dribbble, Behance, or custom sites are great, but they have a hidden cost.
They're static. A portfolio designed in 2021 still looks like 2021. You can't casually share a sketch, a breakthrough moment, or a design failure that taught you something. Everything needs production quality. Everything needs perfect lighting, perfect crops, perfect descriptions.
The result? Designers either:
- Spend months building their portfolio site instead of doing the actual design work
- Post only their most polished work, hiding the interesting journey
- Maintain multiple platforms (Instagram for process, Dribbble for finished work, Medium for thinking)—exhausting
Why a Microblog Works Better
A design microblog flips this on its head. Instead of asking "Is this portfolio-worthy?", you ask "Is this interesting?" There's a different kind of freedom in that question.
I built Jottings thinking about my own creative work, and designers have found something I didn't initially expect: it's the process posts that generate the most meaningful conversations.
One designer I know uses Jottings to document her UX design research. Not the final case study—the raw insights. Screenshots from user testing, customer quotes, design decisions made and unmade. She tags them #research and #strategy. When someone looks at her work, they're not just seeing the endpoint; they're seeing the thinking.
Another uses it for his interaction design work. He posts GIFs of micro-interactions, sometimes with a sentence: "Trying a three-frame animation for button feedback. Too much?" His followers have become his design critics in the best way.
What Makes This Different From Your Blog
You might think: "I could just use Medium or start a blog." True, but blogs are essays. They're long-form commitments. A design microblog is lower friction—it's a sketchbook made public.
Post a design decision that surprised you. Tag it. Move on. Post a color palette you're obsessed with. Post a typography discovery. Post a question about your design problem, inviting feedback.
The tagging system becomes your design discipline taxonomy:
- #branding for logo and identity work
- #interaction for motion and UX
- #illustration for visual work
- #process for work-in-progress
- #research for discovery and insights
- #thinking for design philosophy
Your portfolio isn't a static thing anymore. It's a living record of you as a designer—how you think, what excites you, what you've learned.
The Professional Angle
Here's what surprised me: designers started using their Jottings sites on their resumes and portfolios. Not instead of—alongside.
Why? Because when a hiring manager or potential client visits a traditional portfolio site, they see the finished product. When they visit your design microblog, they see your taste, your process, your depth. They can tell whether you're thinking systemically or just pushing pixels.
And if you're serious about it, Jottings supports custom domains. Your design journal lives at yourname.design or portfolio.yourname.com—your own branded space, not buried in someone else's platform. It's yours to control, yours to grow, impossible to delete or get shadowbanned.
One designer I admire uses her Jottings site as her actual portfolio. She links it on her resume. The homepage is an about page with her design philosophy. Below that: a living feed of her work, process, and thinking. No fancy animations, no javascript-heavy gallery—just clear, simple presentation of her work and her voice. And it loads instantly.
Building Your Design Microblog
Getting started is simple:
- Create your site with your name or your studio name
- Post your first design with a photo and a few sentences about it
- Tag by discipline—create a consistent tag system for your design areas
- Mix finals and process—alternate between polished work and behind-the-scenes thinking
- Connect your custom domain to make it officially yours
The first few posts might feel informal. That's the point. You're building a design diary, not a marketing brochure. The formality comes from the consistency and quality of your thinking, not from perfect presentation.
Why This Matters Now
The design industry has changed. Clients and employers don't just want to see what you can do—they want to understand how you think. They want to see your taste, your decision-making process, your ability to communicate about design.
A microblog does something a traditional portfolio can't: it shows growth. Look at someone's last three months of posts, and you see how they're thinking today, not how they thought two years ago.
It also shows humanity. You're not a portfolio; you're a person with a practice. That distinction matters more than ever.
One More Thing
The best part? The designer community that's building on Jottings. They're following each other's work, having real conversations about design decisions, sharing inspiration, and creating accountability together.
It's less like Dribbble (where you post into the void) and more like the design community you wish you had. Because you're building it in real time.
If you're a designer tired of choosing between a "formal portfolio" that takes forever to maintain and informal platforms that don't feel like yours, maybe it's time to start a design microblog instead.
Build in public. Document your process. Show your thinking. Make it yours.
Start your design microblog today—it takes 30 seconds.