I've been working on a lot of small touches over the last few months that all sum up to what is now the 2.0 version of this website.
Here are some of the new features.
Case Studies
Launched my first design case study, the first step to transforming this site into a portfolio of my design work. Check out the case study for Monograph Communications, a recent brand and website project I completed (all remote, while in quarantine I might add. I've also been posting about this project recently on my Dribbble and Instagram pages.
Grid Experiments
Grid Experiments is a set of projects on this website where I've recreated iconic pieces of grid-based graphic design using web layout technologies like CSS Grid and Flexbox. This is how I describe the project:
But, up until now I didn't really have a way to spend as much time with these designs as I wanted to. You can only learn so much from saving things to a folder and looking at them from time to time. I wanted a way to spend more time with these designs, recreate them (to the best of my ability), and maybe even learn from them to make my own designs more creative. Each of the designs featured on this page was built responsively using web layout technologies like CSS Grid and typography from Google Fonts.
Cosmetic changes
I've also made a fair amount of cosmetic changes.
- Inspired by Grid Experiements, I started aligning my website elements along a six-coloumn grid, which you can see in the header and footer.
- I removed my headshot from the homepage, and redesigned the About page. I wanted to be a little more lowkey with the homepage and have it focus on my work. Then when the visitor wants to learn more about me, then they get to see my happy face on the About page. I also illustrated my 3 values, which you can see in the screenshot above: Gratefulness, Optimism, and Growth.
- I added quite a bit to the site footer to make it feel more fleshed out. I developed a quotes feature using Webflow's CMS database. So each time the user visits a new page, it pulls a random quote from a special quotes database I built, along with a link to the quote source (if there is one). I intend to add more quotes to the database as time goes on.
- I'm being more active in my search for work and new clients, so I also added a blinking green light to the homepage hero section, with a tag that says "Currently accepting new clients". Along with the new Monograph case study, I intend to launch more case studies soon to show off more of the work I do in my day to day as a web designer.