In the past few years of my online presence, I’ve bounced between an indexhibit-esque-simple-left-nav design, a layout with colorful thumbnails of my work, and briefly a one-page website. Each design had pros and cons, and addressed the needs I wanted to emphasize at the time. With this redesign, I wanted to move away from just displaying finished works, but to create a space where I could talk more about the process and to document my thoughts. More importantly, I wanted to design something that could grow with me.

I started my first website with a left navigation with just a few projects from sophomore year of college, and it was very easy to keep updating the site, adding new projects as I completed them. However, I began to realize as I added more projects, visitors clicked on less projects as the one or two word titles meant little to them. There was no incentive to keep looking. The thumbnail gallery style (my second design) provided an easier point of entry to the visitors, but the seemingly arbitrarily chosen thumbnails didn’t do the projects justice. Projects became just pretty colors and lost their integrity. The one-page layout was borne out of an attempt to facilitate the visitors to look through more projects. However, the page quickly became overwhelming when I included longer descriptions about each project. I’m excited about this design, which hopefully addresses some of these challenges.

There are definitely more kinks to work out, and it will be improved as I experiment and learn. Let me know if you have any feedback!