FINALLY UPDATED MY PORTFOLIO WEBSITE!
It only took 1.5 days.
I've received a few compliments about my previous portfolio site. I've made it private now to avoid confusion as I still don't have the heart to delete it.
Cute but unclear, and quite possibly cumbersome to recruiters who don't like to browse websites.
First things first, I don't design/code my portfolios from scratch.
I use cargo.site, which I've been using for over 10 years. My blog may look pretty snazzy right now, but this knowledge was only acquired recently. I also don't want to spend time designing the portfolio when all these nice templates exist, because it's time-consuming enough to add projects.
Semplice/Wordpress
When I made a career switch and pursued UX writing, I created a new portfolio on Semplice, which uses Wordpress as its content management tool. As a fresh UX person, I thought this made sense since I planned on writing many case studies. I've only written two, and now case studies are out, apparently. Good riddance!
Back to Cargo
I came trudging back to Cargo because, unlike Daniel (who introduced me to Semplice), I don't care for the latest portfolio-building website. There are so many now and it would take so much time just to decide on the "right" one.
Cargo does the job just fine. A lot of their featured templates look more like web projects which I thought was cool, and because I was reluctantly coming back to the design world*, I needed inspiring things to get me interested again.
* I burned out from graphic design in 2019 and switched to product design/UX writing.
The good thing was, it worked! For a bit. I had a lot of fun immersing myself in the design world again, and enjoyed building the site. However, after I made most of the changes, I never went back to updating it. I had projects that were "coming soon" for like, an entire year. The process was fun, but the upkeep wasn't.
And while the previous design was fun, it didn't showcase my work at all.
It almost felt like I was ashamed of my work and hid it behind a distraction. Look, it's Kirby walking across the screen! I wanted to show off my personality rather than my actual portfolio. I've seen designers with really cool and funky websites, but most of these people have jobs and can probably afford to be themselves now.
That was my biggest gripe about all of this. How job searching forces us to remove our clothes and put on a sterile uniform, so we can fit neatly inside our assigned boxes. But anyway, I digress.
Starting over
As tempted as I was to use an interesting template, I decided to play it safe and went with bare bones basic. I detested the idea at first. After I had picked out the template, I didn't go near my computer for two days.
Then, yesterday, I decided it was high time I got started. The downside about Cargo is that you can't just switch out templates. You need to create a new site and migrate your projects and assets one-by-one to the new site. Annoying, but since I had done the hard work two years ago, it went by a lot faster. In fact, I planned to migrate just one project, and ended up migrating all of them. Sure, I stayed up until nearly 3 AM, but it was DONE!
And shockingly enough, I love the new look. My work is there, exposed. In fact, I had to brush aside imposter syndrome noise as I was working on them. These projects are so old that it feels like I created them in another life. But I still did them, and nobody can dispute that!
I added pretendtypewriter as a project! Because it is, and one that I'm very proud of!
In the template, the projects are meant to be tiny pop-ups at the bottom corner of the screen, which you access by clicking on the photo. The font was teeny tiny, and Daniel said I should make a page. I ended up using overlays, and I like the subtle transparent background.
I also did away with case studies. They were much too long and frankly, boring to read, even though I was treating them like creative essays.
The project pages are my favorite.
The home page is now just a slideshow of my work.
Minimal and gets the job done, hopefully? I can haz job for real now?!
Now I just need to update my CV to match, because I was using fonts inspired by the previous site. I still have one project I want to add (the zines I made with Vince!) but they're on my dying ancient Macbook—which I need to resuscitate—so I'll do that next week.
I'm happy I finally did the bulk of the work, as this website should be easier to update in the future. My portfolio has always been linked down below in the footer, so if you're curious, feel free to take a look.
In the future, I would love to build a personal site (like Neocities) where I can put ALL of my endeavors in one place. But I'm having a lot of fun with the blog now, and I don't want to take time away from that. Also, I've never checked out Neocities but the sites there are so amazing that it's daunting. Hm, perhaps this is something to add to the bucket list.