My CV says Strategy Director. It lists agencies - good ones, the independent and creative shops, not the holding companies. Fifteen years of client work, pitch wins, campaign launches, team leadership. It's a perfectly solid document. Respectable. Well-formatted. And it's completely inadequate at showing what I'm actually capable of.
The CV tells you where I sat. It tells you the job titles other people gave me. It tells you that I worked at places you might recognise, on brands you might have heard of. What it doesn't tell you - what it can't tell you - is what I can make. What I choose to build when nobody is watching. What I care about enough to spend my evenings and weekends on. That's what the portfolio is for. And increasingly, that's all that matters.
Credentials vs craft
A job title tells you where someone sat in a hierarchy. A portfolio tells you what they made. These are fundamentally different kinds of information, and the gap between them is widening.
In the old world - and I spent most of my career in it - credentials were the currency. Which agency. Which clients. Which awards. These signalled competence and, more importantly, they signalled that other people had already validated you. Someone hired you, promoted you, kept you around. That was the proof.
But credentials are borrowed authority. They tell you about the institution, not the individual. I know brilliant people at mediocre agencies and mediocre people at brilliant ones. The agency name on your CV tells me almost nothing about what you personally are capable of. It tells me you cleared a hiring bar. That is all.
A portfolio is different. A portfolio is primary evidence. It isn't someone else's opinion of your ability. It's the ability itself, sitting there, live, clickable, usable. When I can point to fourteen live projects - each one designed, built, and shipped - that's a kind of proof that no CV can match. Not because the projects are perfect. But because they exist. They work. People use them. That's a different kind of evidence entirely.
Building in public
The portfolio itself is a product. This is the part that most people miss. They think of a portfolio as a container - a place to put your work. But the container is the work. The portfolio site is project number one, and it tells people more about you than anything inside it.
My portfolio is a statement. The typography - DM Serif Display for headings, Inter for body, Space Mono for labels - is a statement about taste. The animations are a statement about attention to detail. The project cards, the hover states, the way information is structured - these aren't vanity. They're evidence. Evidence that the person behind this cares about craft at every level, from the macro structure down to the pixel.
When a hiring manager or a potential collaborator lands on my portfolio, they aren't just seeing my projects. They're experiencing my standards. Every design decision is saying: this is how I think. This is how much I care. This is the level I operate at. The portfolio doesn't describe these qualities - it demonstrates them. And demonstration always beats description.
This is why I spent time on the scrollbar gradient. This is why the reading progress bar exists on blog posts. This is why every card lifts slightly on hover with the right easing curve. None of these details are necessary. All of them are important. Because they're the portfolio's own statement of craft.
The conversation starter
Every project is a door. Not metaphorically - literally. Each one opens a different kind of conversation with a different kind of person.
Modern Retro opens conversations about AI and creativity. When someone sees 1970s-style retail stores for modern brands, generated by AI, the questions start immediately. How did you make these? What tools did you use? What's the creative process? That conversation leads to discussions about AI as a creative tool, about the role of art direction in an automated world, about taste as the differentiator. These are exactly the conversations I want to have.
CultureTerminal opens conversations about media and curation. It's a cultural signal aggregator - a tool for tracking what's happening across the internet. When media people see it, they understand immediately. They ask about the sources, the editorial approach, the potential applications. Some of my best professional conversations in the past year started with someone discovering CultureTerminal.
The London Pub Guide opens conversations in... pubs. This isn't a joke. Telling someone you built a pub guide is one of the best networking moves available. Everyone has an opinion about pubs. Everyone has a recommendation. The project becomes a shared interest instantly.
Each project is a networking tool that works while I sleep. It sits there, live, discoverable, doing the work of introduction and demonstration simultaneously. No CV has ever done that. No cover letter. No elevator pitch. A live product, with your name on it, accessible to anyone - that's the most powerful professional asset you can have.
Beyond the CV
Here's the pitch that no CV can make: I taught myself to build products in weeks. Not in a bootcamp. Not in a degree programme. With an AI tool and an obsessive attention to detail. From zero coding experience to fourteen live projects, five custom domains, four automated pipelines. In weeks.
Now imagine what I would do with resources. With a team. With a real budget. With designers and engineers and product managers to collaborate with. If this is what I produce alone, working from my flat in London with nothing but Claude Code and conviction, what happens when you put that energy and taste into an organisation?
That's the question the portfolio asks. Not "look at my experience" but "look at what I do when I care about something." Not "I've fifteen years in strategy" but "I've fifteen years of strategy AND I can build the thing." Not "hire me for what I have done" but "hire me for what I'll do next."
The CV is backward-looking by definition. It's a chronological record of the past. The portfolio is forward-looking. It's a demonstration of capability, of taste, of initiative. It says: I didn't wait for permission. I didn't wait for a brief. I didn't wait for someone to give me a budget or a team or a title. I just built.
If you're a strategist, a creative, a designer, a writer - anyone sitting on ideas that never get built - I'm going to be direct. Build the portfolio. Not a PDF. Not a Behance page. Not a Notion doc with screenshots. A real portfolio with real projects that real people can use. Projects with URLs. Projects that load. Projects that someone can share with their colleague and say "have you seen this?"
It doesn't need to be fourteen projects. It could be one. One genuinely good thing that demonstrates your taste, your thinking, your ability to ship. One live URL that proves you aren't just someone who talks about ideas but someone who makes them real.
The CV isn't dead. It still has its place in HR processes and formal applications. But the portfolio is the new currency. It's the thing that makes someone stop scrolling, lean forward, and think: I need to talk to this person. That reaction - that moment of genuine interest - is worth more than any line on any CV. And it only comes from showing, not telling.
