On Taste, Part 2 | by Julie Zhuo | The Year of the Looking Glass | Medium

Many years ago, when you were still new to the profession of design, you sat around a table squinting at a monitor. On the screen was somebody else’s life’s work displayed as a series of screenshots wrapped around an HTML shell. This was your first portfolio review, a tried-and-true tradition where once a week, a handful of designers at your company gathered to peruse the portfolios of other designers—applicants and acquaintances and artists whose work rose to the surface after many hours of scouring the nooks and crannies of the Internet. The process was simple enough: start with the week's list. Pull up each candidate's portfolio one by one. Peruse. Discuss. Decide if we should reach out. Rinse and repeat. Right. Easy. Except for one little problem: you had no idea how to decide. Oh sure, the bad was easy. Those were always the quickest. You know it when you see it. Overly complex wireframes. Polished projects that look like wireframes. Comic sans not used ironically. Similar to how

Many years ago, when you were still new to the profession of design, you sat around a table squinting at a monitor. On the screen was somebody else’s life’s work displayed as a series of screenshots wrapped around an HTML shell. This was your first portfolio review, a tried-and-true tradition where once a week, a handful of designers at your company gathered to peruse the portfolios of other designers—applicants and acquaintances and artists whose work rose to the surface after many hours of scouring the nooks and crannies of the Internet. The process was simple enough: start with the week's l