Kill the Creative Portfolio

2027 SXSW Workplace Presentation PanelPicker Pitch

My great-grandfather carried painted placards door to door in Minneapolis – his portfolio. A century later, I’ve hired 200+ creatives, and taught portfolio development since 1999. Every portfolio is a bet: strangers can only absorb a sample of you. AI just called that bet. When a machine can read everything you’ve made, the whole body of work becomes the credential. What happens when probabilistic systems replace deterministic curation, and what should creatives (and those who hire them) do about it? New research debuts here: creative leaders and hiring directors, surveyed in 2010 and 2026.

PITCH VIDEO

DRAFT PRESENTATION SLIDES

TAKEAWAYS

  • Why every portfolio is a compression technology built for limited human attention; and why AI just deleted that constraint.

  • What to do: Keep, Index, Answer: three concrete moves that replace portfolio-building. None of them require AI.

  • What you’ll witness: A live in-room demo of how hiring managers engage portfolios in 2026. The audience will interrogate a 25-year body of work, unrehearsed, on stage.

PRESENTATION REFERENCE

I’ll incorporate very brief creative hiring manager soundbites in the presentation, following this approach:

From my Curiosity+Courage podcast: Chief Creative Dave Weist on the gigantic plastic portfolio that got him kicked out of buildings.