Personal Website

This project is a website where I introduce myself, showing a bit of my personality and my professional passions. I made this project, right before I started applying to jobs because I was looking for a front-end position and I only saw fit to present myself and my work on a webpage.

This project is divided into two phases, the first where I first came up with the concept and developed this website, and the second, three years later, where I decided to improve some aspects, that led me to change more than what I was expecting at first.

I started thinking about building my own website, while I was finishing my master’s degree because I knew I was about to enter the job market and before I started applying to jobs, I decided to focus my time on developing a website to introduce myself.

So this project was about self-reflecting on my personality, gathering my main professional passions, how I wanted people to see me and represent those characteristics on this webpage.

Before I started designing, I wanted to really work on what I wanted to show and how I wanted to show it. What I wanted to show was simple, my website is for possible clients and employers, so I had to show my skills, what I do, what I’ve been up to, and some more information about myself.

My next focus was on how I wanted to present this information about me. I’m a professional with a very distinct set of skills. I love typography, doing web animations, working on fun user interactions, illustrating and coding and I came to the conclusion that I wanted to show a little bit of all of this.

I also wanted the website to be more light, playful, and show some of my personality through my website. Knowing the “what” and “how”, I started designing mockups for the website and experimenting with some aesthetics.

Let's say I didn't have the typical step by step approach working on this website. Being a web designer and front-end developer, I didn’t wait to have my mockups perfect to start coding, and in my opinion, in this specific case, I don’t think it was a bad thing. Starting coding early on allowed me to easily and quickly see what worked, whatnot, and focus more of my time on working in animations and usability.

With most of the “skeleton” of the website done, I decided to take some time to focus on the interactions and animations. I was doing this directly on the code, so it was a process where I had to do and re-do animations until I was fully happy with them. This allowed me to design and develop my website in a month, with me liking it for quite a long time (it’s not easy).

Now we get to the second phase.

Two years later, I still enjoyed my website, but across these two years, I gathered a few things I thought could be better and at the same time, with knowledge obtained in my job experiences in product design and frontend development, work on minor visual adjustments.

Even though I liked the website, I realized my written information could be a lot better. So, I made the decision to re-write most of the texts and make them more light-hearted and playful. This included restructuring the information and re-write all the projects to give a better insight into the project and its full process.

So I planned to do re-writing and since I had to make some minor adjustments to the frontend, like some minor alignment issues and apply a modular type scale to the website.

Everything was according to plan until I started coding and changing the mockups. Then I realized I wanted to change more things that previously I wasn’t counting on working on. Some of the issues I found were, the contact area wasn’t visually coherent with the rest of the website, the project gallery didn’t contemplate having more than five projects and the SEO could get some work.

In the end, I ended up changing a bit of everything.

Comparing the first and the second phase, most of the aesthetics and feel are the same. Secondly, I just wanted the website to communicate better and to be visually cleaner and coherent.

I really liked developing this project. It was brief, but since I had to do some introspective, right before I started my professional life, it was a great chance to figure out what I really enjoyed working on.