Designer Credibility Index
Your portfolio, LinkedIn, and resume have to survive three evaluators with three different standards. This scores all 35 signals they respond to and ranks what to fix first.
Want to see one first? Read a full sample report, scored exactly the way yours will be.
Need it today? Same-day for $199, ordered before 4pm Central on a business day. No call required to start.
Overall score
Who this is for
Both have years of shipped work behind them. One is being screened out right now. The other has not tested their materials against a hiring process that changed while they were busy doing the job.
Three or more years of shipped work. A layoff took the job, not your ability. Now the applications go out and nothing comes back, the severance clock is running, and every week you spend guessing at what is wrong is a week you do not get back.
Two years of layoffs changed what hiring screens for, and most designers found that out the week they needed a job. Your materials were built for the old process. Learning which parts stopped working costs you an afternoon now. It costs you months if you wait until the reorg is announced.
Individual contributors with three or more years of shipped work. "Designer" covers a dozen jobs and they are screened differently, so here is the list:
Mid-level, senior, staff, lead, and principal are all individual contributor roles and every one of them counts. Design manager and above do not. It is the same list the intake form asks you to pick from, so the page and the report agree about what you are being scored against.
Under three years, or still breaking in. Bootcamp graduates, career switchers, and designers without shipped work will get a report full of real gaps they cannot close, because the fix is more work rather than better framing.
Design manager, director, and above. You are judged on organizational impact, headcount, and what your team shipped without you in the room. These 35 signals do not measure any of that, and scoring you against them would tell you very little you can use.
The promise at the top of this page is that your work is not the problem. That only holds if the work is there. I would rather tell you now than take your money and prove it in a PDF.
What you are actually climbing
Every design candidate clears three separate filters before anyone discusses a job. Each one throws out most of who is still standing, and almost every application is built for exactly one of them.
1,400M
Treeline · the approach
Gate 01 · 10 signals
You are not competing yet. You are being read by robots.
They score keyword alignment in context and discard anything that parses badly. They cannot read an image-only PDF, a portfolio locked behind JavaScript, or a skills list with no evidence attached. Fail here and no human ever sees your work.
2,900M
Exposed ridge · the ascent
Gate 02 · 10 signals
A person moving fast, likely not an expert in "design," with a stack of candidates to screen, and no reason to slow down for yours.
Five seconds to decide whether to keep reading. Two to three minutes total if they do. Everything that matters has to be legible before they have consciously decided to look.
4,200M
Summit push · thin air
Gate 03 · 10 signals
Where strong designers lose, and almost never because the work is weak.
The materials never state the constraint, never show the reasoning, never report the result. The craft is visible. The thinking behind it is not. A hiring manager cannot hire what they never saw you decide.
Every altitude
Weather · conditions
5 signals
Stale dates, mismatched history, dead links, a site that looks parked.
None of these are about your work. All of them cost you before anyone can articulate why, because they read as someone who stopped paying attention.
Summit
All 35 signals scored against the role you are actually chasing, with the evidence cited on every one and a fix list ranked by what it costs you to leave it broken.
Delivered within 2 business days. No tiers, nothing held back.
What you get
Out of 100, with a letter grade, calculated against every signal we could actually observe.
Strong, weak, missing, or not observable. Each one cites the specific thing on your site, profile, or resume that earned the status.
Named specifically, with the signals that back it up. You should know what to protect, not only what to fix.
The three to five highest-impact problems, stated plainly, with no cushioning.
Ranked by expected impact on interview conversion, not by how easy each one is. Usually five to seven items, each tied to the gate it affects.
If a signal cannot be observed, it is marked not observable and excluded from your score. Nothing is inferred and nothing is softened to be polite.
You do not have to take my word for any of this. There is a full report published, start to finish, scored exactly the way yours will be. Read it before you decide.
Who is scoring this
Twenty years in design and technology, most of it building enterprise systems. Most recently inside an institutional bank. I have written the requirements, sat on the panel, and read the portfolios that got passed over. I know what a hiring manager says out loud about a candidate and what they say after the call ends.
I have also been the one applying. In November 2024 my employer replaced half my team with outside vendors and I was part of what got cut. So I went through the same screen you are going through: the automated filter, the recruiter who never replies, the portfolio you rebuilt twice that still did not land an interview.
Job hunting in design and tech is exhausting in a way people outside it do not see. The silence is the worst part, because silence teaches you nothing. You cannot fix what nobody will name. That is the entire reason this exists. It names the thing.
The 35 signals are not my taste or an opinion. They are what I watched decide outcomes from the hiring side, checked against what actually failed for me on the candidate side. No cushioning, no guessing, and no telling you your work is the problem when it is your evidence.
Three ways to take it
Every tier includes the full 35-signal report and all three bonuses. What changes is how much of me comes with it.
Report Only
$149
No cap, always available. The scoring is automated, so there is no queue.
Delivered within 2 business days.
Need it today? Same-day for $199, ordered before 4pm Central on a business day.
Limited · 6 a week
Report + Walkthrough
$299
Six a week. That part is my calendar.
Report and video together, within 5 business days.
Only six recorded walkthroughs get made each week.
Limited · 4 a week
Report + Live Session
$499
Four a week. Same calendar, longer session.
Your report and your session land the same day, so the date you book is the date you get it. Booked right after checkout, held within 10 business days.
Only four live sessions happen each week.
Included at every tier
Four arrive with your report. The fifth is a second scoring 30 days later, so the question "did any of that work" gets an answer instead of a feeling.
Your fix list turned into fourteen dated assignments of ninety minutes or less. Day 1 is one task, not seven. It sequences the work. It does not do the work.
All 35 signals with a real before and after. What "constraint not named" looks like when it is failing, and the sentence that fixes it.
Do the fix list, come back inside 30 days, and get scored again on the same 35 signals. Signal by signal, so you see exactly what your work moved.
Platform-specific settings and snippets for Squarespace, Framer, Webflow, and Notion. The technical signals, fixed without a developer.
One short email a day for fourteen days, tied to that day's sprint assignment. It asks whether yesterday's task is done.
Before you send your links
Report Only lands within 2 business days of you sending your links, or same-day if you take the $199 option and order before 4pm Central on a business day. The $299 tier delivers the report and the video together within 5 business days. The $499 live session gets booked right after checkout and held within 10 business days, and your report is sent the same day as that session, so the date you book is the date your report lands.
Yes. A rough or in-progress portfolio, a LinkedIn profile, or even just a resume is enough to start. Part of what the report tells you is what to build next and in what order, which is more useful before you have poured a month into the wrong thing.
It is the best time to do it. You get an honest read while nobody is forcing you to fix anything overnight, so you are ready the day the right role appears instead of starting from scratch under pressure.
$149 if you trust yourself to read a ranked list and act on it. $299 if you want to hear which gap I would fix first and why, because the ranking gives you the order and the video gives you the reasoning. $499 if you think the score is going to be wrong about something and you want to argue with me, or if your best work is under NDA and needs a conversation.
Both are capped so every walkthrough gets real attention. Six recorded, four live, every week. If a tier is full, put your name down and you get first pick when the next week opens, or take Report Only now, since it has no cap.
Tell me 48 hours or more before it and you get the full $350 session fee back. Inside 48 hours it is half, $175, because four of these happen a week and I cannot fill the slot that late. Either way you keep the report and the bonuses, so the $149 stays put. Full terms are on the refund policy.
Yes. If you started with Report Only, you can add the video walkthrough for $150 or the live session for $350, which is the difference between what you paid and the full tier price, any time while that week has slots.
The report is automated. It runs whether I am asleep, on a call, or on vacation, so there is no queue and I am not going to invent one. The video and the live session are me, and there are only so many of those in a week.
There is a 12-Signal Self-Check, and it is genuinely free. It gives you the twelve critical signals to answer about your own work and a provisional letter grade. What it cannot do is see your work the way a stranger does, score the other 23 signals, weigh any of it against the role you are targeting, or tell you how to fix a single thing. Those four gaps are the $149.
No. Portfolio feedback tells you what one person thinks of your work. This tells you where your candidacy structurally fails a screening process. Two designers can get identical feedback on their visual work and score forty points apart here.
Then you should not pay for it. If your report does not hand you at least three specific, actionable findings you did not already know, tell me within 7 days and I refund it in full. No form and no runaround, and you keep the report and the bonuses.
No, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. This finds where your candidacy is failing a screen. Getting through that screen is necessary, not sufficient.
Send this page to another designer stuck in the same spot and they get 15% off with code DESIGNERFRIEND. If they add your name in the "Referred by" field at checkout, you earn a $10 credit per referral, up to $150. The credit goes toward future Ambitious Designers community services, which are not live yet. It is tracked for you now so it is there when they are.
The report is the diagnosis. The OS is the system that fixes it and keeps fixing it: you build your own evidence library and a set of skills that take a job posting in and produce a matched site, case studies, and outreach for that specific role. It is being built now, and the quiz below is how I decide what goes in it.
If this week is full
Six recorded walkthroughs and four live sessions a week, because both are my calendar rather than the scoring engine. When a week fills, put your name down and you get first pick when the next one opens. The report itself never queues, so it is not on this list.
You get one email the moment a slot frees up, sent to the address you just gave me. If it does not show up, check spam and mark it not spam so the next one lands.
Do not want to wait? Report Only has no cap, and you can add the video or the live session later for the difference in price.
Free, twelve questions, about five minutes
Twelve of the 35 signals are critical. They are the ones that stop the process before a human forms an opinion about your work, and they are what decides an A, a B, or a C.
The self-check gives you those twelve to answer about your own portfolio and resume, and hands you a provisional letter at the end. It is self-reported rather than observed, it covers 12 of 35 rather than all of them, and it names what is failing without fixing any of it. All three of those are stated on the page, because a free version that pretends to be the paid one is how you lose somebody twice.
Eight questions, about two minutes
Ambitious Designer OS is the thing that comes after the report. It is not finished. I would rather build with you and what you actually need than what I assume you need.
The quiz asks where you are in your search, how you work now, what is actually blocking you, and what a system like that is worth to you. You get a straight answer at the end about whether it is a fit, including when it is not. No sales call, no pitch.
Send your links, get a real answer, and know exactly what to fix first.
Know another designer stuck in the same spot? Send them this page. They get 15% off with code DESIGNERFRIEND, and you earn a $10 credit per referral toward what comes next.