A portfolio is a great way to present yourself, your work and the skills that you have accumulated overtime. That is why it is important to have a portfolio whether you are a developer or a designer.
That’s why, personally for me, I have been trying to create a portfolio that reflects my own personality and style. But I also wanted to show all of my vulnerability and my weaknesses. My attention to detail, but also my perfectionism. My love for design, but also my love for code.
I wanted to create high quality, and accessible products in the internet. I firmly believe that the web is the future and most apps will be written in the web. Imagine a future where you won’t have to worry about your dependencies missing, where you don’t have to worry about cross platform issues and hard disk space being a problem of the past.
That is the future that I want to help build, I want my future applications to be easy to use and available to everyone.
This is one of the considerations of when I recreated my portfolio, I wanted my site to be as accessible as possible (and will continue to become so) without sacrificing a beautiful landing page that will give visitors a great first impression to me.
The Design Process
The design process was simple, create a figma prototype, design some components, then do some cleanups before implementation.
The hard part is the actual implementation, you see as a developer/coder, there is a tendency where the design can change especially if you are the leader of your own project.
I started with staying close to the source material as possible but ended up adding some additional content and effects to what I believe what will improve the experience of the site.
But it’s okay! A prototype will most definitely not have a 1:1 representation of what the actual product will look like.
And if you do decide to provide some changes to the code, you can always add it to your prototype to keep it in sync! (which obviously defeats the whole purpose of prototyping but better early than late or never!)
I was honestly rushing to finish the prototype ASAP so that I can focus on the code but what ended up happening is after a good looking prototype is I added some more unique things in the actual implementation that was also added after it was implemented!
Inspirations
And obviously, I heavily took inspiration from the apple website, nothing beats the apple website in my opinion when it comes to timeless design, I personally have not seen the company changing the look of their site and I do not see in the future that they will actually recreate their design.
I also took inspiration from the linear.app landing page, go ahead and visit the site! Take a look of it in all it’s glory; And it was so good that some of the new startup sites took inspiration from it!
And to be honest, I do not blame them, If you want users to be attracted to your product a good landing page is the key to that!
Conclusion
In this article, I discussed what was my thought process and where I took design inspirations and consideration when building my portfolio site, the site will continue to improve just like me, and I hope what I’ve built today is what I will be in the future!