Portfolio Design

Designing is not my strength, but somehow I’ve been doing it a lot these days. I spent a lot of ton of time doing, redoing, fixing, scrapping and lamenting over the design of this website.

I completely overhauled the design dozens of times and eventually narrowed down on a couple of things I really wanted to do in my portfolio. These design constraints might be a bit unusual and may not impress everyone.

Design constraints

1. Printability

Definitely not a common design constraint. However, I figured that some of my target audience or even myself, may want to print this “portfolio” as a hard copy to keep in a file somewhere. Because website portfolios are usually pretty hard to access during an interview and keeping a physical copy can prove that I did something with my website.

If you tried to print my home page, you’d probably realise that it’d look pretty good whether you printed it in portrait or landscape. I also made sure my online resume (CV) was quite printable and PDF-able, so that it’d update with my latest projects.

I’d say most of the site is pretty printable in general.

Printable designs tend to be quite simple though. Or “boring” so to say. So I tried to update it with a brightly coloured design.

2. A bright design

I changed the colour palette several times through the multiple design changes. Some designs were really dull in colour and did not fit the printability concept very well. I eventually hit a #2A9D8F and #E9C46A as the main colours. I used #264653 as a “black” and #E76F51 as a highlight colour.

I also spent some time to find a fun font to fit the bright design.

The stickman was made as part of the bright design beccause I can’t draw. I think it ended up unexpectedly fitting. The pointer / wand actually has a common code icon </> if you noticed.

Overall, it’s still not an amazing or fun bright design, but I’d say it’s a decent bright design and not a dull coloured one.

3. Fast waiting times

As someone who likes backend slightly more than frontend, I like to make sure my websites are fast. I can make fancy on-scroll animations, whether SVG or text, but waiting for them to “load”, or finish their animation, can be pretty tedious. Everyone has a different opinion, and some don’t even notice it at all.

I designed my portfolio landing page hoping that the reader would get exactly what they wanted from this website, as fast as possible. There isn’t any javascript at all, except for the mobile menu.

My portfolio doesn’t show off my frontend skills though, and it may even look a bit static to some (= boring). Hence, I really do plan to make a fancier version some day. It’d the exact same design with printability, but with animations and other stuff. Would it be truly better and worth the trade-off with slightly higher waiting times? I’m not sure.

Closing comments

I think I’ll forever consider myself a bad designer. I may have grabbed a couple of books on graphic design from the library, but I’ve never had formal training as a mostly sciences student and I just don’t have the intuitive feel for placement, colour, typography and a lot of other important tools in the graphics toolbox.

But at least I can appreciate a good design (or so I hope) and eventually forge out something decent. Something that fits my needs.