Compiled by @anirudhux · 26 Apr ‘26

The Shape of
Design Portfolios.

Personal sites had voice. Now they have a grammar. Fourteen designers who cleared the bar, and the conventions they’ve quietly all converged on.

The trait matrix.

Tap any header to sort. Bars are normalized within each column, so outliers pop. Bio length counts the self-description sentence(s) at the top.

Counts approximate where pages are JS-rendered (Soren, Singer at the new domain, Yuan).

The five archetypes.

The dashed pentagon behind every radar is the corpus median. Each filled shape is a deviation from it — and the deviation is the archetype's identity.

How to read the radar
Hover any radar to reveal its axes. Click for the read.

Voice and interaction.

The two registers the radar can’t catch. How the bio sounds. How the page moves.

Six standing patterns.

Conventions that show up in 14 of 14, or close to it. The unwritten rules of the genre in 2026.

Compiled by @anirudhux · 26 Apr ‘26