My portfolio has a brand new look! I designed the old version almost a year ago and whilst it was in the direction I was trying to take it I wasn’t happy with the overall result.

Any designer/developer will tell you the hardest thing to create is your own portfolio, you have so many ideas of where you want to take it, what you want to use and what technologies you want to include you get lost in the details.

The Old Portfolio

I wanted a minimal look but it ended up looking a little light on colour and lacked personality, the portfolio section I felt didn’t really make the reader want to delve further and the blog I rarely updated.

I drew up several other designs but soon after each design I disliked each and every one of them, I stepped away from my portfolio and waited for inspiration to strike.

The New Portfolio

I started of with a number of palettes and color schemes but could not decide on one, so in a moment of madness I decided to try them all!

The home page I have used the Dribbble, Twitter and Last.fm APIs to show visitors my latest interactions on these sites and have a larger slider to show my more recent work, the portfolio has a much larger and inviting portfolio page, the about section is more in depth and offers the reader more information about me as a person and designer/developer. The contact page has more contact options and links to my social profiles.

The blog I have spent a great deal of time on as I fully intend to make good use out of it this time around, the blog automatically will show the amount of retweets of each post in the circles alongside the post title, next to the date posted and comment count.

I opted to use a fair amount of CSS3 in this design, but it has fallbacks for the older browsers so it should gracefully deprecate for these users.

Feedback

During my design process I was fortunate get some feedback from other professionals that I rate very highly on a professional level, but rate even higher on a personal level. So a big thank you to John Clarke, Amber Weinberg, Grace Smith, Andrew Champ and Ryan Olson for taking time out to give me your opinions!