My brand new, fresh portfolio

Where it all begins

I try to refresh my portfolio as often as once a year, it’s usually a good exercise to see how I’ve changed as a designer and developer implement my learnings into my own work, however this year I was gonna do something different, you see, although I enjoy refreshing the design and write the code from scratch using a new tech, maybe testing out an idea or two here or there, I think it’s time to make something a bit more scalable, something I can keep using and expanding for the next few years

Why is this important

So you might be asking yourself, why is it important to update the entire portfolio once a year? Why not just stick with what you have and keep adding your latest work to it… Well that does work, except for the fact that as a designer, you work clients essentially and working for clients doesn’t necessarily mean that you create things that you love, you’re restricted by a lot of things (keeping the client happy, sticking to brand guidelines, sticking to stack, sticking to what engineers can produce and so many other factors) So working on my own projects becomes more important, I get to work with the tech that I like, the design trends I like, the languages and framework I like, I basically become my own client.

What were you trying to achieve

So I thought about what I wanted this version of my portfolio to be, I wanted to be able to tell a story about myself and my professional life, I wanted to show off who I’ve worked with, I wanted to create case studies about projects I worked on but sometimes I wanted to create a pretty design where it’s not a whole product, I wanted to write small programs and try some of the new languages and technologies I come across, I wanted to be contactable and a lot of other things.

I started out by doing a thorough research in the industry, looking at other portfolios and noted down the things I liked about other portfolios. I also remember watching a movie, Spider-man Into the Spider-verse, I remember falling in love with the color palette of that movie and a lot more about it, so I took inspiration from that for my portfolio.

How did you achieve it

For design I chose my usual design tool, Sketch, and a lot of research into what I like, branding and how I wanted the website to look, I liked the new blob trend that was going on and wanted to do something with that.

For Development I’ve been hearing about React a lot lately and wanted to see what the fuss was all about so I tried it for this project, I used react and Next.JS for server side rendering and wanted to challenge myself by not using any framework like Bootstrap or Foundation so decided to write everything from scratch, for styling Iused SASS as my pre-processor with CSS modules and for the layout I turned to CSS Grid and Flexbox, the website also had to be responsive so I made a lot of effort making sure that was also possible.

I think learning a whole bunch of new stuff was a bit overwhelming but at the end of the day it was totally worth it. I worked hard on this portfolio and hope that I can keep on working on it to complete it.