The portfolio project that gets you hired isn’t the prettiest one

Digital tools are great levellers. They allow anyone to make clean, correct work. But when everyone uses the same software, the same stock assets, and the same mockups, the results start to blur together.

To stand out, your graphic design portfolio needs friction. Texture. Evidence of decision making. Something that feels made, not assembled.

This is exactly what Shillington graduate Emma Hand discovered.

Given a brief for a comedy festival, she could have stayed safely inside Adobe Illustrator. She could have downloaded a set of vector illustrations and polished them to perfection.

Instead, she stepped away from the screen.

Emma bought a box of foam clay and started sculpting faces. They weren’t perfect. They had fingerprints, uneven edges, awkward expressions. They were full of personality.

She set up a small photographic studio in her bedroom, shot the faces, then brought them back into the digital world.

That decision transformed the project. What could have been “another solid branding concept” became a stopper.

In interviews, people didn’t just glance at the work and move on. They stopped. They asked questions. They wanted to know how and why she made it.

Not because it was prettier than everything else, but because it was different.

The real strength of Emma’s project wasn’t just the making. It was what she did next.

She treated those clay faces as serious design assets. She cleaned them up in Photoshop, balanced them against bold typography, and built a flexible system around them.

Those imperfect, physical elements were rolled out across:

• Posters, creating visual tension and hierarchy
• A booking website, acting as playful mascots
• Merchandise, like tote bags and t-shirts
• Social posts, adding genuine character to the feed

This is what elevates a portfolio project. The ability to take something raw and expressive, then shape it into a functional brand system.

That’s design thinking, not decoration.

If your work is starting to feel safe, close your laptop. Pick up a pen. Use paint. Cut up magazines. Model clay. Photograph a texture. Capture something you can’t download from a stock site.

Then scan it. Digitise it. Refine it.

The industry isn’t short on people who can make things look correct. It’s short on people who can make things feel interesting.

You don’t need to be an artist. You don’t need to be messy for the sake of it. You just need the courage to experiment.

The project that gets you hired might not be your cleanest layout. It might be the one that proves you think differently.