For years, my portfolio homepage was a clean grid of client logos. No context. No story. Just names — and the assumption that visitors would connect the dots between a recognizable brand and what I actually did for them. Those logos on colorful fields were doing a lot of heavy lifting — and making incorrect assumptions about the visitor that I didn't realize were actively hurting my chances of landing new clients or finding work.
The headline said I was a graphic designer who loved to code. That was it. The work existed, somewhere, buried behind clicks. But nothing on that homepage told a story or gave anyone a reason to keep scrolling.
I knew it needed to change. The rebuild happened in stages — I was splitting time between a WordPress portfolio and my Squarespace site, unsure which to commit to. Eventually I kept both (they serve different purposes), but Squarespace became my primary site for job applications, and that's where I focused. By October 2025, it was in a place I'd call finished — though finished is relative when you're a designer working on your own site.
The Problem
Logos assume too much.
A logo says "I worked with this company." It doesn't say what you did, why it mattered, or how you think. It asks the visitor to already care — before you've given them a reason to.
That's a problem when the person landing on your site is a hiring manager with 40 portfolios open in tabs. You have maybe 10 seconds before they form an opinion. A logo grid gives them nothing to grab onto.
Logo grid with a tagline
Clean, minimal — and almost completely useless to anyone who didn't already know who the clients were or what I did for them.
Home page with heart,
Case studies with soul.
Each project tells a story: what was the problem, what did I build, what does it look like, what did it take to get there.
The Shift
From what I made to how I think.
The core change was moving from logos to case studies. Instead of assuming a visitor would connect a brand name to the work I actually did, I started writing out the actual story.
A logo says "I worked with this company." A case study says "here's what I actually did, how I thought about it, and what it became."
That reframing changed how the whole site reads. It also changed what I curated. The old index approach meant every project got equal weight — which is really the same as no weight at all. Focusing on a featured set meant the work that mattered most actually got seen.
What I learned
A few things I'd tell myself earlier.
Curation beats comprehensiveness. Showing 6 strong projects is more powerful than showing 20 average ones. When everything is featured, nothing is.
Your site is doing a job. If you're job searching, your portfolio isn't a personal archive — it's a pitch. Everything on it should earn its place.
Coming soon cards cost you. A "coming late 2026" placeholder in prime real estate tells a hiring manager the portfolio isn't ready. Move incomplete work off the homepage until it's done.
Two project types, one story. If you have brand + web work for the same client, tell it as one cohesive case study. Splitting it into two entries dilutes the arc.
The Result
The feedback came quickly.
Not long after launching the updated site, someone who was actively hiring found me on Threads and reached out. Her read on the portfolio:
"You understand what people looking to hire a designer actually want to see. You understood the assignment."
— A hiring manager who found melewdesign.com organicallyThat kind of signal — unprompted, from someone actively hiring — tells you the work is landing. The site isn't done. Case studies are still in progress, projects are still shipping. But the difference between a logo grid and a narrative portfolio isn't cosmetic. It's the difference between a list of clients and a body of work.
