Reflecting on the limits of portfolio formats during continuous AI exploration.
I updated my site a bit, but I’ve been personally researching what’s possible with AI 24/7 for four years now. Heavy usage. Visuals, music, video, storytelling, code, agents, nuances of transparency, everything. I want to know what is possible, what’s an improvement, what’s new and different. For professional design, I also want to know what’s reliable and repeatable. So, I hammer on it, experiment and study it, to get a deep instinct for what’s possible.
Updating my site feels like slamming on the brakes and switching to snail mail to send a telegram.
The same goes for LinkedIn. I didn’t touch it for years because it never had more than one timeline. It seemed not conducive to conveying multiple streams of work effectively in a format people are trained to scan quickly. If you switch to a purely algorithmic approach on LinkedIn, it becomes even less reflective of the multiple streams happening in parallel, in my experience.
I added a case study because it felt like the expected format for showing work. But I’m not convinced it’s particularly useful given how people are primed to interpret it.
The priming assumes that formats like this can convey the scope of someone’s history or skills. For experimental digital design that blends visual practice with AI and traditional design techniques, that’s a skill I’m not sure comes across.
Still, I completely participate.
But I don’t add the NDA work, the synthesis of personal research, the thousands of exploratory visuals, or code sandbox apps, or the vast majority of the things I’ve explored. Instead of dwelling on that, I set it aside and keep doing the work.
I’ve been exploring AI generation continuously for four years. Even the case study strips out entire swathes of lessons learned in order to fit the format.
There’s nothing on my personal site that fully conveys that or what I’ve been able to do with it. I stripped out the consistent characters and world I created around them using LoRAs. I narrowed scope to just their interiors. Added the brand case study was an attempt to convey the living lab format. I don’t mention that I also created all original music for each video.
The case study points toward a living lab, but I’m not sure that’s what actually comes across when someone looks at it.
I’m used to working under NDA. In that world, you don’t tell anyone about anything. Packaging work publicly is the opposite dynamic. If your work is visual and your designs are beautiful, sometimes you simply can’t show them.
Conversely, when your designs are live on some of the most visited platforms in the world, you don’t always think to capture them as a case study.
So sometimes I create things I can show. Often those are personal explorations. But then they become harder to frame with impact metrics, so I keep them visual.
There are also different definitions of privacy depending on the product ecosystem. Fintech and social media operate under very different constraints. Large parts of both never make it into the design portfolio.
When in doubt, I leave it out.
To be continued.