February 2021 Portfolio Updates

Updates to my UX portfolio site, what I call “Version 4”.

Screenshots of portfolio site, on a black background.
Portfolio in 2020, using “Swiss” header. At the end of 2020, my portfolio looked like this.

To summarize:

  • Home page with 4 stacked rows of projects, then a grouping of companies and brands at the bottom.
  • Each project had a large image and a “Swiss” style for the title.
  • Three projects at the bottom linked to other projects, but not all of them had images.
  • I included testimonials from LinkedIn, which are the tan blocks of text.
  • And, as always, I was not sure what to do with the About page….

Feedback Generates Ideas…

I can’t remember who reached out to whom, but a friend and I had a video chat about her desire to revise her website. During the chat, I gave her a little walkthrough of what I did to update my own website, including the 2019 Portfolio Analysis and the research I conducted to complete it. She also gave me some feedback as she clicked through my site. So, I knew I would make some changes, but I also got a few new ideas.

Not only did I make updates to my website, she also gave me a suggestion to create a complementary Google Slides presentation. I’ve definitely started that, but of course I got side-tracked into website updates!


Major Changes for 2021

One change I was aiming for was to create a more unified look across all project pages, regardless of whether they had an image or not. For this, I used the same headline style, with a heavy top border above the title. With or without a main image, the headline looks the same.

I also made an update to the main index page, which is all the way on the left in the pale green color.

Mockups of portfolio updates, on a dark background
“Version 4” updates to my portfolio. Two right-most pages have similar treatment to the title, but one has an image and one doesn’t.

There were actually so many changes, I wrote a little note to myself in my own Sketch file! So here is what I wrote to myself:


Version 4, Feb 2021 — Major changes

The goal of these changes was to unify the look of all projects, even those without an image. And to include projects that were on the website in 2019, to provide more balance and make sure the projects are not too research heavy.

Major Changes

  • Changes layout of index page to 2 rows of 3 project + 4 projects. It is a big departure!
  • Removes the “swiss poster” look of project pages. All pages now have a top border, heading, sub heading — including About and Colophon.
  • Addition of Next project section at bottom of every project page, with list of next 4 projects including project and description. Single link to next project is gone.
  • About and Colophon are using an elegant thin weight for titles; it does not read well for longer titles
Updated About and Colophon, with thin font weight for title text.

Other Important Changes

  • Moves Heineken project out of project list
  • Moves Adorama to 2nd tier project (no 7)
  • Changes “Small Bites” to “Catalog”
  • Removes all [project] links to blog, except for Adorama Deep Dive
  • Removing Top “hat” icon from bottom pages, and replacing with character entity arrow to reduce server calls. Only Adorama project calls the Emoji CSS.
  • Removed unused color variables from CSS file, and not really use most of the ‘small-bites’ class

Minor Changes

  • Punched up the contrast by using dark-gray font on all pages, except for subheadlines, “eyebrow” text (mostly all caps/ tracked) using gray
  • Changed the display of company/client profile and role, below header
  • Increased font size of most text on mobile, esp header sizes

Sadly, my updates meant abandoning my beloved Swiss style (which is a template within the CSS framework). But instead, I was able to sort of borrow from other inspirational images.

Examples of Swiss style posters/type design.
Inspirational images from my Sketch file.

Conclusion

Maybe some of these changes don’t seem like much but it was a drastically different site with very different projects.

But it didn’t end there! The next post will have the changes I made in March 2021, for even bigger changes.