Sharing Work That Is Not Visual

Sharing your work is an important part of your design life, especially as a freelancer. You need to show potential clients or employers what you are capable of and the best way to do that is by showing your past work.

Sharing work is easy as long as there are clear results and artifacts. It is especially easy as long as these results and artifacts are visuals. A website design, a mobile app, or a software interface. If you were involved in the creation of the interface, showing that is straightforward.

However, in some cases, sharing your work as a designer is not so easy. Maybe you were part of a larger team and your focus was research or concept work, not visuals. Maybe you worked on strategy and ideation and no visuals were created during the project. Or maybe you signed an NDA and are not allowed to share anything at all.

My recent projects fall somewhere between those categories. I did produce visuals, but can not share them. Most of my work was concept and strategy work, resulting in documents, boards, and stakeholder presentations, not pretty visual designs.

How do you share this type of work, while also respecting the NDA?

I am going to experiment with a few ideas on this. It is a recurring challenge for me (and other designers as well, I assume) to share work regularly that is not easily shareable.

I am going to experiment with a few ideas on this. It is a recurring challenge for me (and other designers as well, I assume) to share work on a regular basis that is not easily shareable.

A few ideas I have right now:

• Create visuals for the work. Instead of trying to explain a concept, strategy, or some other form of non-visual design work, you could try to visualize the work or the result of it.
• Mention and tease a project. Instead of sharing the actual project (which you might not be able to do due to an NDA), share the nature of the project and your role. By speaking in general terms, you can at least let others know you worked on something instead of not mentioning it at all.