For someone starting out in the field of UI design and looking to showcase their portfolio to land that first job, you can do a couple of things. You can look up design briefs online and come up with design solutions for it and post it in your portfolio. Alternatively, find an app, website, tablet app, anything basically, which you feel could use a better UX and design makeover and redesign them in the way you think will be ideal. Also, mention why you did it in your portfolio so people understand your problem-solving skills and thinking abilities. Please don’t put up redesigns of sites like Facebook, YouTube etc. Companies are not looking for those skills of yours. Rather, show what’s wrong with those sites and post the solutions of those on your portfolio.
Another way you can showcase your design skills is to take up design challenges. There is a challenge called the DailyUI challenge where each day, you receive a prompt for a design task, i.e, something on the lines of designing a dashboard, login screen, a booking page, a landing page etc. You design the page and share it on social media like Dribbble and Twitter and receive critic and feedback on it. You can try and experiment with tools, interactions and motion design with this challenge and later add all these screens as part of your UI design skill set.
