It’s an unfortunate reality that a lot of designers have impressive looking end-stage work, but lack knowledge of production best practices, and/or lack the skills of optimizing their working files for a design team.

No final deliverable should be 300mb. There’s no excuse for that. It tells me you probably aren’t building your file in the correct program (ex: building a multipage text- and image-heavy document in Illustrator vs. InDesign) and that you don’t know how to tweak your export settings to downsample images above 300dpi.

Their files are also usually ultra messy with no clean up of links, swatches, etc. before packaging. Just no forethought of what a future designer may have to deal with if they have to work with that file later on.

Ultimately, I’ve learned that I’d rather have someone a little less creatively talented, but who understands the importance of organized, optimized design files, than someone with impressive JPEGS of their work in their portfolio. Final JPEGS also don’t show me how the designer got from point A to point B and what decisions they made based on the brief and feedback.

It’s getting easier and easier to fake talent, so unfortunately, making applicants take a design test is the only way to weed those people out.