The portfolio is becoming a playground

Happy Friday.

I dropped a video this morning about the new design portfolio.

What’s getting callbacks in 2026 versus what we were all taught to build. It’s being well-received and I think you’ll find it valuable.

• Alexis Presa said, “Tommy doing the Lord's work over here for designers”

• Kyle Zantos said, “This is legitimate nutrition”

• Shams said, “I want every designer - new or senior- to watch this video”

Here's the longer argument, plus a few things worth your attention.

– Tommy (@designertom)

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The portfolio is becoming a playground

A study timed 16 design leaders reviewing portfolios. Average decision time: 55 seconds. They're not reading. They're clicking around, getting a feel, and moving on.

I know because I'm helping companies like Cursor, Vercel, and Figma find designers right now.

The Figma 2026 hiring study dropped this month:

• 73% of hiring managers now say AI tool proficiency is increasingly required.

• Visual craft still tops evaluation criteria at 58%.

• But 56% of open roles are senior. Only 25% are junior.

DesignerFund adds the contradiction: design job postings are up 60% year-over-year, but only 20% of hiring managers think the market is improving. Demand is rising. Just not for the designers who were trained five years ago.

The portfolios getting callbacks — for the companies I work with — look nothing like what most of us were taught to build:

• Chloe Yan's interactive playground.

• Preston Booth's micro-interactions.

• Seb Cornelius's shipped file-sharing app.

• Wora Work's spatial world.

• Ryo Lu, the head of design at Cursor, whose personal site is a collection of experiments.

These are proof-of-work objects you can touch, break, and explore - not case studies.

I spent ten minutes on Chloe's site the first time I saw it. Not 55 seconds.

This week Jack Dorsey cut Block from 10,000+ to under 6,000 — framing it as an AI capability decision, not a cost one.

Small teams, good tools, higher leverage. PwC's AI Jobs Barometer found the same pattern at macro scale: industries most exposed to AI saw jobs rise 38%, but the jobs look different.

The new apprenticeship

I've been calling this pattern "tool osmosis."

The tools carry you further than your skills alone, but knowledge transfers in the doing. Spend a month going deep on Claude Code or Cursor and you’ll come out knowing things you didn't before.

It's a new kind of apprenticeship — faster than the old one, and it involves one human instead of two.

My friend Kyle Zantos calls it "software as a gift" — build something small for someone specific. A tool for your partner. A website for your friend's band. Ship it for a real person. That's proof worth showing.

Four paths keep surfacing:

1. Micro-interactions — hover states, loading transitions, 15-second details that prove craft

2. Build a playground — let hiring managers explore your thinking, not read about it

3. Software as a gift — ship something useful for someone real

4. Learn in public — document the building, not just the built

The portfolio isn't a PDF anymore. It's becoming something you interact with — something that proves you can work with the tools reshaping the work itself.

I broke all of this down in the video →

Quick Hits

• OpenAI — $110B raise at $730B valuation. SoftBank $30B, NVIDIA $30B, Amazon $50B. 900M weekly ChatGPT users, 50M subscribers, Codex tripled to 1.6M weekly users. The infrastructure bet keeps scaling.

• Retool survey — 35% of enterprises already replaced SaaS tools with custom-built software. 78% expect to build more in 2026. The internal tool landscape is shifting faster than the vendor marketing suggests.

• WealthSimple — new "AI Builders" program lets you submit an AI system instead of a traditional portfolio. Applications close March 2. First major financial platform to treat AI fluency as a first-class hiring credential.

• Meta / Manus AI — Meta's $2B+ acquisition of Manus is bringing autonomous agents into Ads Manager and enterprise products. The agent layer is consolidating fast.

• Figma earnings — $300M quarter, 40% YoY growth. Design tools aren't shrinking. The work is consolidating around the people who can use them at a higher level of leverage.

These are tools I actually use, so I asked them to sponsor the newsletter. They said yes. The best way to support us is to check them out 👇

• Framer → How I build websites without code

• Mobbin → How I find design patterns fast

• MagicPath → How I design in canvas

• Contra → How I hire and manage freelancers

• Dscout → How I run user research

That's it for this week.

I'm working on a follow-up video — an "AI native designer" rubric.

What specific skills, what portfolio signals, what interview questions separate the designers who are adapting from the ones who are optimizing for a market that doesn't exist anymore. Should land soon.

If you've rebuilt your portfolio recently — or if you're hiring and noticing something different — hit reply. I read every one.

See you next week.

Tommy