This portfolio website (responsive and mobile friendly) is a showcase of my best UI/UX work in recent years, and also serves as a repository for photos that I had taken with different smartphones. I’m also planning to crank out blog posts to share my thoughts and reflections mainly about User Experience Design related topics, but also for all the various things in which I'm involved.

This latest version of my website is the result of flexing my creative (and technical) “muscles” to make the most out of my Squarespace subscription, taking a break from work, and enjoying my free time for a few months.

Designed for a purpose

My goal was to craft a website with great content and a design template to support this. The design of my online portfolio needed to be rooted deeply in fulfilling its purpose. It needed to sell me to potential employers, allow me to capture and reflect on my existing work, and encourage me to start writing down my thoughts. The design needed to be clean, with a modern look and feel, and approached with a content first mentality.

Believe me, this required incredible restraint and relentless focus. The process of trimming down to the non‐essentials was a hard and excruciating experience. I now have a finer appreciation for the expertise, experience and maturity required to craft an effective, timeless design.

My advice to anyone designing their portfolio is to really take the time to sweat the details. Treat it like any real project. Don’t fall into the trap of just designing for the moment. Think about how your design will scale in the future. Will your website be able to grow as you do? While it might be tempting to quickly bash out a trendy design, it will hurt you more in the long‑run.

Achieving a truly minimalist design is a sign of craftsmanship and craftsmanship is about quality, not speed of delivery. The idea that creating a minimalist design requires less time is completely flawed. So anyone who thinks ‘going minimalist’ will save time is wrong.

This website was 2 months in the making. I used custom CSS and Code Blocks to add custom code to some pages of the Squarespace template I installed. Code Blocks are good options if you want to embed third-party widgets or customize pages beyond what's possible with other blocks.

A work in progress

I don’t consider this website to be finished (I don’t think I ever could), I’m just proud that it’s finally in the wild and able to gather real feedback. At this point in time, I’m not too worried about getting it perfect. Accepting mistakes is a necessary and healthy part of the process, and as with most things, I don’t get them right on the first go anyway. So I’m completely comfortable with the website being unfinished. If you poke around hard enough you may notice some typography and layout bugs/inconsistencies which I will eventually fix.

I also plan to incrementally refine and iterate this design template. So I’m reaching out to you to take a look around and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Compliments, comments and critique are all welcome.

Thanks for reading.