What slop looks like in portfolios
"Hi, I'm Alex, a passionate designer", a gradient blob, a skills section with percentage bars, project cards with placeholder thumbnails, and a contact form. The site is the template everyone in the cohort used, which is the only thing it says about the designer.
What a designer would have done
Three real projects with the problem, the work and the result, the designer's own layout decisions visible on the page, and a way to reach them. A portfolio is a design decision made public; a generated one is a confession.
Tells to check first
- A template nobody customised: The demo template's structure, section order, placeholder image ratios and sample headings are all still there, with only the words changed.
- The purple gradient: A hero background or button that fades from indigo to violet to pink, the house colour of the 2024 to 2026 AI builder generation.
- No sentence only this business could have written: Read every sentence on the home page. None of them names a place, a person, a year, a price, a real customer or a real limitation.
- Social links to the platform home page: Footer icons for X, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook that link to x.com, linkedin.com and instagram.com, not to any account.
- Lorem ipsum shipped: Placeholder text, "Your text here", "Heading 2" or "[Company name]" left on the live site.