How I stopped postponing my portfolio and let the archive work for me
There’s a sentence you hear a lot among freelance designers: “My portfolio is outdated, but I’ll deal with it later.” That “later” can last months or years. Paid projects come first, client urgencies swallow up time, and curating your own work always stays at the bottom of the queue. When a big opportunity finally appears — a more serious client, an agency, an invitation to speak at an event — panic sets in: “I need a decent portfolio… yesterday.”
The problem is rarely a lack of material. Designers who have been working for years almost always have more than enough. The problem is friction: digging through external drives, opening dozens of folders, trying to remember which file was “that incredible work for brand X”, and exporting everything again in presentable versions. It’s exhausting even before you start, so the task keeps getting postponed until it can’t be anymore.
It was from this real scenario that the idea was born to treat Ufish not only as an archive, but as a lazy portfolio generator. If the app is already constantly tracking your work on the Mac and building a visual library of what you do, why not use that to take the first step in building your portfolio? Instead of starting from zero, Ufish can suggest what seems to be the “best of” from your own archive.
Imagine opening a “Portfolio Mode” view, where the pieces that appear recurrently show up right at the front: large files, high-quality exported layouts, projects with multiple visual variations. These are signs that the work had relevance in your workflow: you invested time, created several versions, used them for presentations. Instead of rummaging through folders, you start with a natural selection, based on the actual life of your studio.
From there, curation stops being “desperate searching” and becomes “refinement”. You can mark favourites, remove projects that no longer represent what you do today, group by type of work or client. Little by little, the portfolio stops being an abstract monster and becomes a visible collection of pieces that you can move, reorder, and turn into something publishable. The secret is starting with a ready visual base, instead of an empty folder.
Another advantage is rethinking the portfolio as something living, not a static PDF you make every five years. If Ufish is already there every day, following your projects, it’s much easier to spend 15 minutes a week fine-tuning that selection. Did you finish a piece you’re proud of? It’s already there, visible. Just mark it, adjust an image, think about how it fits with the rest. Gradually, you keep your portfolio close to the present, instead of letting everything pile up for later.
There’s also the question of format: not everyone wants or needs a big, complex website. Some designers prefer a well-edited PDF, others like using platforms like Behance or a simple site with just a few pages. The idea is that Ufish helps prepare the visual raw material — images, sequences, covers — in an organised way, so you can export it in different formats without redoing the work a thousand times.
Underneath all of this is the same philosophy: less friction, more focus on what matters. Ufish won’t tell you which projects to choose, but it can make the first 60% of the process easier: finding, gathering, and showing, in one place, what most deserves to go into your portfolio. The final part — the identity, the tone, the story you want to tell — remains yours. But you’re no longer fighting against folders and files; you’re working from a visual wall of your best work.
And while the current version already does a good job as a visual library and base for this “lazy portfolio”, we’re preparing a full version that will give even more power to this idea: better ways to group, export, and turn your collections into presentations, PDFs, or online showcases. All with the same premise: 100% independent, running on your Mac, without using your data to train AI models and without locking you into an ecosystem you don’t control.