Don’t treat AI as a shortcut to build a portfolio. Use it to show you know how to use it ethically, and how to leverage it to provide more and better value for yourself and your users.

Because if you use AI as a shortcut, what comes out is not yours. It often looks the same as other portfolios. Repetitive structures, repetitive looks. And we don’t want this. I’ve seen this year literally the same sentence structures in portfolios.

Your portfolio competes with other designers. So if you use AI as a shortcut to build it, I’d not hire you, and I’d not want you to build products for my users. Imagine that everyone does it. Every product looks the same. There’s no competitive advantage.

So below I am sharing 5 ways on how to use AI ethically when building your portfolio.

Use case 01

❌ “What should my portfolio say about me?”
✅ Give AI your CV, your LinkedIn, your past roles, your projects, then ask what the pattern is

This is one of my favourite use cases, because positioning is the biggest issue I see on calls with designers. Shaping positioning takes a level of self-awareness about your own career that is hard to shape quickly. You need to do research on YOURSELF before you can define a strong job strategy, and the portfolio comes after that.

And AI is good at spotting patterns that you would need a lot of time to analyse. But it is bad at deciding which pattern you want to be hired for.

Then you make a trade-off, because there is always something you will have to give up on (B2B over B2C, startup vs corporate etc.). We can’t have it all so be brave to decide wisely for yourself.

Use case 02

❌ “Write my case study from these notes”
✅ Record a voice note about the project, then let AI turn it into a portfolio brief

When you let AI write your project stories for you, you will most likely end up with generic and shallow stories that will not convince hiring managers of anything. On top of that, I’m already seeing how case study headings, titles and other sentence structures start to look the same between different portfolios (e.g. X problems, X solutions, X truth or other BS). You don’t want AI to guess what happened in a project, and you also don’t want it to use its voice for your stories.

Everyone has access to AI, but no one has access to your own voice.

And I know, it’s not easy to write. I’ve been doing it for 5 years creating content online. Even writing this newsletter today is tricky. But I treat it as a learning part, an exercise. With a portfolio it can be slightly easier, it’s not like you write something different every time. That’s why I recommend creating a master file for this. Simply, a Notion page with your stories that you can improve with every portfolio iteration.

Make your story yours.

Use case 03

❌ Generating screens that were never in the product
✅ Handing AI your real process artefacts and asking it to tidy them up

But fully asking AI to invent UIs for you is not a good strategy. It’s another shortcut. And it would actually be silly to do it, since UIs are the key artefacts of our job as designers. Yes, you can show UIs created together with AI agents, but not something you fully handed over to AI. If you present a project in your portfolio that involved AI in a workflow, make sure to explain it.

That’s also a tip for any other part of a project, like research or analysis.

When it comes to portfolio visuals, the mastery lies in the details. An experienced design hiring manager will spot those things and see immediately whether a mockup was created fully by AI or not. And don’t forget that visuals alone are not enough. Make sure to communicate your thinking, through writing but also through visuals like diagrams, schemes and different ways of presenting the product.

Use case 04

❌ “Build me a portfolio site”
✅ Vibe coding it yourself, section by section, with AI on the parts you can describe precisely

If you use one prompt to generate your whole portfolio site, then good luck to you :D Vibe coding is totally fine, as long as you are the one who decides what to build, how it should look, how it should feel, how it behaves. You can’t just copy another designer. And if you use one prompt, the same thing will happen as in every other example here, you will end up with the most generic portfolio site ever. No advantage in that. You think you are saving time, and then you do not get the interview, so you spend even more time on it anyway.

You are a designer, so the design decisions are the part you are being hired for. Handing those over is the one thing that makes no sense. So think through everything in your portfolio site, why this, why that. Treat the building part as another project and a learning journey. It can honestly be fun if you just start.

Use case 05

❌ “Is my case study good?”
✅ “Read this cold. What do you think the project was about?”

The first question gets you nothing, and it’s a leading question. The second gives you a form of test, whether a stranger can understand anything from your story. It’s not an ideal test, but it’s a quick one that can give you some insights. It’s especially helpful when you don’t have a mentor or a peer who would review it for you.

Honestly, the sky is the limit here. You can check your visuals, ask for a UX audit of your portfolio, a clarity check, accessibility, anything. It’s a fun way to learn how to leverage AI better, and it's another story for your portfolio or your job interview.

Tools I actually use in my workflow. Some links support this newsletter.