Two Line Pitch

What it is. The two line pitch is the crisp opener that kicks off every case study in a design portfolio. It tells the reader the client the core problem and your specific role in two tight sentences or less. Nothing more. A hiring manager scanning your site in the typical 90 second window should understand the project and your contribution without scrolling. The example from the design portfolio guide nails it. Redesigned the checkout flow for a fintech client serving 2M users across 18 markets. I led UX partnered with a brand designer and three engineers and shipped a flow that reduced cart abandonment by 23 percent over the old baseline. This section is the hook. It sets expectations for the entire decision log that follows. It forces you to distill months of work into its essence which is harder than it sounds. Good two line pitches include scale numbers your exact contribution and a business tied outcome. They avoid all the usual design jargon that signals insecurity. The pitch proves you can think strategically before you show a single screenshot. Strong pitches make the rest of the case study easier to write because they define the north star. Everything that follows has to support or expand on those two lines. They act as a filter for the reader. If the pitch does not match the kind of work the hiring manager is looking for they move on which is the correct outcome for both parties. This is not a new idea. Case studies in consulting firms like McKinsey have used executive summaries for decades. The two line pitch is the design version of that. It respects the readers time and signals that you understand how hiring works in 2024. You are not owed their attention. You have to earn it with clarity. What it is not. The two line pitch is not a marketing blurb or a value proposition. It is not the place to talk about your process your tools or how passionate you are about design. It is not three or four lines that turn into a wall of text on mobile. It is not vague or generic in any way. Writing I helped a fintech company improve conversions is garbage. It gives zero context about the scale of the company your specific input or how the improvement happened. Designers mess this up by treating it like a resume bullet on steroids or by trying to sound impressive instead of clear. Another common failure is leading with methodology. Conducted user research and iterative design to solve checkout friction for a major payments company. That is not a pitch. That is a description of your methods. The reader still has no idea what the actual project was or what difference you made. It is also not the full story. The pitch does not replace the problem section or the reflection. It is the trailer not the movie. Leave them wanting more details so they keep reading into the approach and the messy middle where your real thinking shows up. Concrete example. A flagship project for Stripe in 2022 reads like this. Owned the complete redesign of Stripe Billing portal for 180000 businesses that process 95 billion annually. Led a team of four designers and six engineers from discovery to post launch iteration resulting in a 27 percent reduction in support tickets and 14 percent increase in revenue per user from better upsell flows. The range setter for a brand project at Patagonia in 2023. Developed the visual identity and e commerce experience for Patagonias new Worn Wear repair program. Collaborated with their in house team of three designers to create a system that increased repair submissions by 52 percent in the first year and reinforced the brands commitment to circular economy. A depth piece from an enterprise project at Slack. Architected the design system migration for Slack enterprise workspaces used by companies with 1000 plus seats. Defined 240 tokens across light dark and high contrast modes which cut component inconsistency reports by 81 percent and sped up designer onboarding from six weeks to nine days. For the collaboration case try this one from a 2021 project at Duolingo. Worked with product managers engineers and language experts to redesign the Duolingo streak recovery flow. Navigated intense debates around gamification mechanics and shipped changes that improved 7 day retention by 19 percent for at risk users. Even the personal project slot gets a pitch. Built and launched FigJam template library called CritiqueClub in 2024 that has been used in 4300 design critiques. Self initiated side project that involved user interviews with 47 designers and grew organically through design twitter to become a standard resource in design education programs. Each example names a real feeling company or project gives concrete scale states your role clearly and ends with a believable metric that a hiring manager can imagine asking about in an interview. They all fit on two lines when formatted properly on your portfolio. Weak versions get rewritten on the spot. The vague pitch I designed a better banking app for a big bank becomes the tight one above once you force in the client name the user count your ownership level and the actual measured result. When to use when not to. Use the two line pitch at the beginning of every case study in your portfolio. Use it to structure the top of your resume bullets for each role. Use it when a recruiter asks you to walk them through your work. Use it in your Twitter bio projects thread or when presenting at a conference. It is the default way to frame any design work when attention is limited which is almost always. Rewrite the pitch for every job application to tilt it toward the role. If you are applying to enterprise SaaS roles lead with systems and scale. For consumer startups lead with personality and growth metrics. Test it by reading it out loud. If it takes longer than 12 seconds to speak it is too long. Do not use the two line pitch as the hero copy on your portfolio homepage. The homepage needs visual work first followed by a one line positioning statement like Senior product designer for climate tech. Do not use it for projects still under NDA. Either anonymize the client completely or leave that work out of the public portfolio. Never use a two line pitch if it requires so much setup that it fails the 15 second test. That is a sign the project itself may not belong in your five project lineup. The pitch is mandatory for senior portfolios because it shows you can communicate at the speed of business. Juniors can sometimes get away with looser writing but seniors cannot.