From-Scratch Build · Web / Portfolio
A developer's portfolio is the one site that has to sell you — and there's no single right way to build it. Portfolio Studies is a set of personal-site takes, each exploring a different answer: minimal vs expressive, content-first vs visually-led, fast vs flourish. I built them from scratch because the portfolio is where front-end craft and self-presentation meet, and both are worth practising deliberately.
What it is
Every portfolio answers the same questions — who are you, what have you made, how do I reach you — but the how is wide open. These studies treat that openness as the exercise: take one person's work and present it through distinct lenses. One leans editorial and typographic; another is grid-led and visual; another strips everything back to fast, accessible, content-first essentials.
Holding the content fixed and varying only the presentation is what makes it a study rather than just "a site." It isolates the real variables — layout, hierarchy, type, motion, restraint — and shows how much the same material can change in feel depending on the choices around it.
The craft
Front-end fundamentals, in service of a first impression.
What the eye lands on first — the spatial decisions that guide a visitor through your work.
Type pairing, scale and rhythm — most of a site's character is in its words' shapes.
One design that holds up from phone to widescreen, not three that fight each other.
Semantic markup, contrast and keyboard support — a portfolio everyone can actually read.
Fast to load and light on the network — the first impression is partly how quickly it arrives.
A small system of colour, spacing and type so each study is coherent, not ad-hoc.
Approach
Each variation follows the same disciplined path from brief to polished page:
Hold the bio, projects and contact info constant across every study.
Choose one idea — minimal, editorial, visual — to organise the whole design.
Define the type, colour and spacing tokens that express that thesis.
Lay out the page responsively and accessibly around the content.
Tune performance and detail until the impression is exactly right.
Reflection