Designing with AI: Showcasing AI Skills in a Design Portfolio

Why incorporate AI in your portfolio

There’s no doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping how UX/UI designers ideate, create, and validate digital experiences. From automating repetitive tasks to transforming user research, AI is showing up in every stage of the design process. But let’s be clear: AI isn’t replacing the creativity we bring to the table. Tools evolve fast, but that human touch—our ability to empathize, think critically, and design with intent—is still what sets great work apart.

More and more design teams are integrating AI into their workflows, and that’s exactly why showcasing AI in your portfolio gives you a competitive edge. A study by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found that AI tools are becoming increasingly common. That's why designers who can think critically about AI outputs are starting to become especially valuable. It’s not just about what tools you’ve used. It’s about how you’ve used them—and why.

AI tools that speed up your design process

There are a lot of AI-related design skills worth showing off—especially the ones that help speed up or improve parts of your process. The most obvious one? Knowing how to actually use the tools.

Yes, it sounds basic. But companies now expect designers to come in with hands-on experience using AI tools. It’s not enough to just list them—you should be able to talk through how you used them, what problems they helped solve, and how they fit into your workflow.

That could be anything from using AI to speed up research, generate visual concepts, automate UI layouts, or stress-test accessibility. The key is to show more than just tool usage.

Let’s go through some of the stages in the design process where AI tools can make a real impact, why they matter, and which tools are most useful for each step.

Ideation

Some AI tools are great for speeding up the early stages of the design process, as they can help you explore more directions even faster. The tool we'd recommend for this stage of the design process is UX Pilot. It is an AI-powered tool aimed at helping designers test and improve their UIs.

Here's our point of view on the tool:

• What we really respect is the level of consideration we have seen in the output. We tasked it with creating a dashboard for a particular use case, and it included some in-progress items and even some locked ones. It did seem to consider the big picture well.

• The overall UI and navigation of the tool itself are great. It’s simple, intuitive, and feels more like a design partner than a rigid system. We'd say the tool feels most valuable in early ideation. But, we can see it being super helpful for non-designers too—kind of like having a designer teammate brainstorming alongside you.

Visuals

Some AI tools are great for generating images, style references, moodboards, and design variations. They are useful for speeding up the exploration phase or helping you visualize a product vibe faster.

Some of the tools we'd recommend for creating visuals are:

• Midjourney: we use it for asset creation and image manipulation. It has become one of the most popular tools for creating images with AI.

• DALL·E 2: an AI-powered tool that generates images from textual descriptions. You can use this tool to generate images of objects or scenes that you can then use in your UI designs.

• Khroma: one of the up-and-coming AI tools for UI designers. It offers valuable assistance in the realm of color selection and palettes.

Research

Some AI tools are built for research. One we like to use very often, especially for deep research, is Perplexity AI. Perplexity AI is a free AI-powered answer engine that provides accurate, trusted, and real-time answers to any question. Perplexity has a few plans available to choose from. If you're thinking of using it lightly or for occasional answers, then the free version is more than enough. But if you're going to use it for advanced AI, frequent research, file analysis, or image generation, then the Pro version is what you'll need.

Testing

Attention Insight is a Figma plugin that you can use to design with confidence. With the help of AI, this plugin predicts where users will look in your design based on data. You can use it to discover if the CTA button is easily seen, perform A/B testing, and even identify the most attention-grabbing element. Attention Insight helps you enhance the user experience quickly just by using it.

Use Attention Insight for:

• User engagement prediction

• Identifying dead zones

• Optimizing key elements

• Backing up your design decisions

• Analyzing heat maps

Tool-based vs. thinking-based AI skills

As we already mentioned, there is a big difference between knowing how to use an AI tool and knowing how to think with it.

Tool-based AI skills are all about execution. You know how to use Midjourney, UX Pilot, or Perplexity. You can generate outputs, run tests, and include things in your process. These are the basics—and yes, they matter. Companies expect you, as a designer, to be familiar with key AI tools.

But thinking-based AI skills are where the real value is. That’s where you show how AI helps you solve problems smarter or uncover new ideas you wouldn’t get to on your own. It’s about understanding when to use a tool, how to refine outputs, what to ignore, and how to make those results actually useful in the context of your project.

It’s one thing to say “I used AI.” and another to say “Here’s how AI helped me reframe the problem, generate different layouts, and choose the one that best meets the accessibility goals.”

When you can show both—what you used and how you used it—that’s when the AI skills in your portfolio will really stand out.

How to make AI work visible in your portfolio

If you’re using AI in your design process, show it in your portfolio, but do so thoughtfully. Instead of just dropping in a random AI-generated screen, treat your use of AI like you would any other part of your design process. Give it context and show your thinking. AI projects in a portfolio work best when they clearly show what you did, why you used AI, and how it made your work better—not just faster.

Here are a few ways for you to showcase your AI skills that feel both intentional and add value:

• Personal projects: Show experiments, what you tried, what worked (or didn’t), and what you learned.

• Client work: If AI helps you work faster, generate better insights, or improve outputs, show it. Maybe you used AI to test different copy variations, stress-test a layout, or synthesize user research. Just make sure you're specific.

• Side projects: Use these to highlight how AI helped speed up ideation, automate a moodboard, or explore brand directions at scale. These projects are a great way to show experimentation and initiative.

And no matter the project type, show your human input.

Include the prompts you used, the tweaks you made, or the constraints you applied. After all, that’s what hiring managers want to see.