Design for the Job You Want: Personal Projects to Build Your Portfolio

A career workbook disguised as a design class

This course is less about teaching design skills than about teaching a process for deciding what to design and why. Alison Koehler frames the entire 121 minutes around a road trip metaphor: point A (where you are), point B (where you want to be), and the portfolio project as the vehicle that connects them. The structure is genuinely three-part, moving from research (self-assessment worksheets) to design (thumbnailing, mockups, visual language) to presentation (writing and case study assembly). Anyone who follows it start to finish will end with a real, personal project built around a demonstrated example, Koehler's own conceptual brand for a series of roadside attractions called The Scenic Route.

The backbone of the class is a set of worksheets: the 3Ps breakdown, a destination mind-map, a "you are here" skills inventory, a bridging-the-gap exercise, an inspiration chart, and a case study checklist. This is the course's real strength. Rather than just telling students to "find their voice," it gives a repeatable framework for interrogating why a project matters, referencing admired studios like Hoodzpah Design and Snask as case studies in how problem, process, and passion show up in finished work. The exercise of analyzing existing portfolios through that same 3Ps lens is arguably more transferable than anything specific to the class project itself.

Where the course shifts into software territory, the lessons on mockups, it becomes noticeably thinner. The three "levels" of mockup-making (photographing real objects, compositing photos in Photoshop, and customizing pre-made Photoshop mockup templates) are presented as quick tips and tricks rather than full walkthroughs. Content-aware fill, puppet warp, gradient maps, and clipping masks all get mentioned, but the pacing assumes the viewer already knows Photoshop and just needs pointers on framing a shot or adding a shadow for realism. A true beginner will likely be lost in these sections, while an intermediate designer will find some efficient shortcuts worth stealing.

The writing and presentation lessons close the loop well. The advice to split case study copy into short, scannable bullet points for one audience and longer narrative paragraphs for another is a useful, concrete distinction that many design portfolios get wrong. Breaking down two example case studies, one from Hoodzpah Design and one from Farm Design, gives students a vocabulary for what "showing personality" versus "setting context" looks like in practice.

The course is honest about its own scope: it explicitly tells students the project will take at least a week, and the pacing reflects that. This is not a sit-and-watch class. It requires stopping after nearly every lesson to fill out a worksheet, and the payoff only arrives if a student actually does that work alongside the video rather than passively absorbing it.

The tradeoff is time investment against specificity. Students get a strong strategic framework and a reasonable amount of software polish, but not deep instruction in any single tool. Someone who wants to learn Photoshop compositing from scratch, or who wants a fast, lightweight exercise, will find this either too shallow technically or too demanding time-wise. Someone stuck on portfolio strategy, unsure what project to build next or how to talk about it, will get real, actionable value out of the worksheets alone.

What you will learn

• ·How to frame any project around the 3Ps: problem, process, and passion
• ·A method for mapping your current skills against your career goals to find a project idea that bridges the gap
• ·How to choose deliverables that best showcase a specific skillset for a target job or client
• ·Practical Photoshop techniques for building and customizing mockups, including content-aware fill, puppet warp, and gradient maps
• ·How to structure a case study with short-form bullet content and longer narrative paragraphs for different types of readers
• ·How to build a moodboard quickly in InDesign using royalty-free image sources like Unsplash and Pexels