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🤿 top 1% portfolio

🤿 top 1% portfolio

+ 4 new design inspiration sources

Ridd
January 21, 2026

Last month the head of design at Lovable, Nad Chishtie, walked us through the portfolio of Matt Sellers.

He’s one of the designers they just hired from the Dive Talent Network and his website is what a top 1% portfolio looks like.👀

So today's episode is a behind-the-scenes of what it actually takes to create a portfolio that gets you hired at one of today's top startups.

He shares some really tactical mental models that I think everyone can benefit from:

Why Matt removed 80%+ of his work
What made Matt's micro copy so effective
How Matt built his project animations in Framer
The finer details of Matt’s portfolio and micro-interactions
How Matt changed his portfolio strategy and why it worked
What it takes to make your portfolio an experience rather than a catalog
+ a lot more

Watch on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

🤝 WITH JITTER

If you’re like me you know that adding motion to your designs is the easiest way to make them feel premium

The thing is… I’m not a motion designer 😅

But that’s why Jitter’s new AI Brainstorm feature is a game changer.

I just drop in my design, and then get instant motion ideas that I can tweak, refine, and make my own.

It’s seriously so easy to animate your work with Jitter I cannot recommend it enough👇

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

I am completely convinced that UX design will own the bulk of the frontend moving forward.

And the more I step into that reality as a designer, the more fun that I have.

On the flip side, it also highlights how much I have to learn when it comes to design engineering and well-crafted animations 😅

That’s why I still reference Emil Kowalski’s animation.dev constantly.

tbh I would be embarrassed if Emil knew how many times I fed his techniques into Claude.

Over 8,000+ builders (myself included) have taken his course and he just opened enrollment for animations.dev for the next 10 days.

I don’t promote courses often but this is one of the few learning experiences I highly recommend so definitely claim your spot before it closes.

Here’s what I’m really excited about though…

Emil is also releasing a new skill file using Claude Code which alone will be worth the price of admission:

“It can review your animations, suggest improvements, and basically answer all your motion-related questions based on my experience gathered over the years.”

Emil Kowalski

I’m about to use that all the time 💪

🔗 FEATURED RESOURCE

4 new sources of design inspiration

By now you know how much I love a tasteful inspiration gallery so here are 4 new resources I’ve saved recently:

1 — Ben Issen’s Inspiration Gallery

I scrolled this for two viewports and already knew it was legit.

Ben is an absurdly creative designer and a great follow on the Twitter bird too.

2 — Detail

Where Ben’s focuses more on full websites, this gallery by Rene Wang obsesses over the finer details and interactions—things like typography, motion, interactivity, and even easter eggs.

3 — Very good components

Remember when Framer sites first started blowing up and all of those component websites launched? I think I paid for 3 of them because it felt like magic to grab a component and paste it into Framer.

Well now it’s kinda like that except for coding literally anything on the web…

4 — Brian Lovin’s “Good Websites”

Is this the greatest curation of portfolio websites the world has ever seen? Maybe

👥 DIVE TALENT NETWORK

Whenever companies I like start hiring, they usually ping me to see if I know anyone great… (like Matt for instance 😉).

So I put together a list of the most talented designers and builders to recommend to companies like Raycast, Lovable, ElevenLabs, and some of my favorite early stage startups.