Personal Site
Website, CMS
January 13th, 2022
The Problem
As I have finished more projects, I have realized the need for a central place to display and summarize them. This digital portfolio needed to be eye-catching in its own right, a display of both my creative and technical abilities when oversight is on my shoulders. It needed to give visitors a solid picture of the kinds of projects I have worked on as well as the range of skills I have.
The Solution
I designed and built a striking but uncluttered front-end designed to make visitors look twice and connected it to a robust content management system which delivers copy and media worthy of that second look. Strapi CMS allows me to easily edit any page, add new projects or experiments and manage SEO all without needing to dig back into the code. The result is the site you are currently browsing.
The Skills Used
- Figma
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe Photoshop
- React
- Gatsby.js
- Strapi CMS
- SASS
- HTML5 Canvas
The Lessons Learned
Make task lists: It is one thing to have a concrete goal and feature set, it is another to have a path to that goal. This was one of the largest projects I have worked on so far and it greatly benefited from breaking its goals into bite-sized tasks. These tasks kept me motivated and productive instead of becoming discouraged by the scale of it.
Sometimes "good" is good enough: As with any project that directly reflects on one's own work, this project began to drag as I tweaked breakpoints and adjusted icons, trying to make everything perfect. Sometimes it is better to have something imperfect to show rather than nothing at all and this project drove that point home.
Screenshots
Early wireframes of the home, projects and experiment pages