Emmi Wu Portfolio
Product Designer at Google
Interdisciplinary designer now at Google, after product design work at Perplexity, a T-Mobile (Vistar Media) internship, and brand design at Chronicle. Built on Framer — balances rigorous product thinking with a "Playground" that shows personality and prototyping craft.
Location
Location: classified. Send a pigeon.
Companies
Credentials
- University of Pennsylvania — Design
- Silicon Valley School of Design — Product Design
- Rhode Island School of Design — Architecture
- Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts — Fine Arts
Skills
What makes it work
A breakdown of the choices that make this portfolio stand out.
Framer as a signal of modern design tooling
Choosing Framer over Squarespace or Cargo is itself a statement. Framer requires comfort with component logic, responsive layout, and interaction design — skills that directly transfer to product work. The medium signals the competency before a single case study is read.
Consumer psychology + design — a rare cross-disciplinary edge
Most product designers have a visual arts or HCI background. A background in consumer psychology brings a different lens: how people actually make decisions, what motivates behaviour, and how cognitive biases shape product flows. This is a genuine differentiator at companies building habit-forming products.
A staggered two-column gallery tagged by company, role, and date
The homepage is a masonry grid of color-blocked project cards — "Comet Voice Mode" (Perplexity, Spring 2026), "Perplexity Health" (Perplexity, Spring 2026), "Internal Tools For T-Ads" (Internship, Summer 2025), "Live Comments On Figma" (Competition, Oct 2025), "Editorial Illustrations" (The Daily Pennsylvanian, ongoing), "Instagram Branding Refresh" (34th Street Magazine, Summer 2024), "Penn Voter Guide" (The Daily Pennsylvanian, Nov 2024). Every card is labeled with its context and timeframe, so the gallery doubles as a dated, verifiable timeline rather than an undated pile of screens.
Early-career positioning anchored by high-signal internships, with campus work as connective tissue
Google, Perplexity, and a T-Mobile (Vistar Media) internship are the headline credentials, but ongoing campus publication work (The Daily Pennsylvanian, 34th Street Magazine) fills the gaps between them and shows sustained design output even outside formal internship periods — a student portfolio that reads as continuously active rather than three isolated summer entries.
What Product Designers can take from this
Specific, actionable tips to apply to your own portfolio — no generic advice.
Build your portfolio on Framer or a tool that requires design skill to operate. The choice of tool is a quiet signal about your frontend design literacy.
If you have a cross-disciplinary background — psychology, economics, linguistics — lead with it. Most product designers have the same training; yours is the differentiator.
Tag every project card with its context and exact timeframe (company/school, season, year). It turns a gallery into a verifiable timeline and makes gaps or overlaps immediately legible to a reviewer.
Student portfolios should anchor credibility on internship quality, not just project quantity — but fill the gaps between internships with ongoing campus or self-initiated work so the timeline doesn't read as three isolated summers.
Prototyping fluency deserves its own mention. Linking to a live Figma or Framer prototype in each case study shows what static screens cannot — how the interaction actually feels.
Case studies
Every card is labeled before it is titled — Perplexity, Spring 2026; Competition, Oct 2025; Concept, Fall 2025 — so a Figma contest entry and a speculative hardware idea sit beside company work without posing as it. Emmi Wu's gallery doubles as a dated, honest timeline.
Live Comments on Figma (Design Competition)
A one-week, four-designer competition sprint (Oct 2025) answering the brief 'How can Figma enable short bursts of creative work?'. The team's insight was that ideas captured on the go lose their context. Their answer was 'live comments' for Figma mobile: sketch annotations paired with live voice recordings, which collaborators can replay on desktop for full context. The case study names teammates Rachel Chen, Christina Raganit and Angelina Cao.
It is a small, clearly labeled piece of work — tagged 'Competition, Oct 2025' rather than passed off as shipped product. It shows a crisp problem framing (context, insights, problem, solution) and working prototypes made in ProtoPie and Lottielab.
7 days, 4 designers, 1 brief — the scope is stated up front
Insight-led: 'a good idea is anchored to context, captured in full, strong enough to build from'
Mobile capture, desktop replay: sketch plus voice as one asynchronous comment
Honest page: says 'more coming soon' instead of padding the story
Internal Tools for T-Ads (T-Mobile / Vistar Media)
Summer 2025 internship on T-Mobile's T-Ads (Vistar Media) team designing internal tools for the digital out-of-home ad ecosystem, in a team of 2 PMs, 2 engineers and 1 designer. Two projects: a 0→1 debugger that let ad-tech engineers pull live campaign metadata from Vistar Media's API, and a campaign viewer that showed independent business and venue owners which ads were scheduled on their screens.
Internal B2B tooling for engineers and media owners is unglamorous, real-constraint work. Designing for two very different users (developers debugging campaigns, venue owners checking inventory) shows range inside one internship.
0→1 internal debugger for ad-tech engineers, described as launched
Campaign viewer balancing high-level overviews with granular creative details
Team stated plainly: 2 PMs, 2 engineers, 1 designer
NDA handled honestly — no invented screenshots or metrics
2024 Primary Election Voter Guide (The Daily Pennsylvanian)
Lead design for the Daily Pennsylvanian's special-edition 2024 Primary Election Voter Guide. The visual language reworks the American flag: colors flipped, a red drop cap standing in for the flag's canton, and blue-lined block quotes echoing the 13 stripes. The page credits the teammates who executed and advised on it by name.
It shows editorial and visual-systems craft — each typographic choice ties back to one idea — plus clear credit-sharing, alongside her product work.
One visual metaphor carried through the whole layout: the flag, reframed
Drop cap as canton, block quotes as stripes — layout decisions explained, not just shown
Team credited by name, including those who executed the layouts
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