Four years ago I started keeping one document per project: every decision, the date, the reason, and what I gave up to make it. It is now about 400 pages. It is the single most useful thing I own.

Why a portfolio fails A portfolio shows outcomes without reasons. Anyone reviewing it has to guess whether you were lucky, and reviewers default to scepticism.

What the log shows That on 14 March I chose a lower-contrast palette because the client's users were older than the brief claimed, and that I was wrong about it for six weeks before the data corrected me. That is a hireable sentence. A screenshot of the final design is not.

How I keep it cheap Three lines at the end of any working session where a decision was made. No formatting. No retrospective editing — the log records what I believed at the time, including the parts that embarrass me now.

The result Two of my last three contracts came from someone reading the log rather than the portfolio. Both clients said the same thing in different words: they could see how I think, not just what I made.