My site has become an absolute mess, so I have been working hard on the actual content first. I want to make sure I have a clear reason for people visiting the site, and then I can focus on evolving it properly. I often spend too much time on the functional side of the site and the content suffers. I need to practise what I preach, so over the past month I have been putting real effort into rebuilding my portfolio.
Previously, the site included some recent work, but I am not confident that it really sold who I am or what I do. While I usually advise people to pick their best work, I am deliberately trying to show range here. That means sharing work from across my career, not just the latest pieces. I am doing this in phases.
So far, I have selected work from each place I have worked. This allows people to explore my startup work, in house roles, agency experience, or freelance work based on the companies rather than isolated projects. The intention is to use the places I worked as a way to explain what I did there, rather than just presenting standalone case studies.
I have been in leadership roles longer than I was purely a hands on designer. While I am still a hands on leader, people often do not fully understand what that role actually involved. Because of that, I have started to explain it more clearly. You can now go to any of the companies I worked at, read about the role, and then see a selection of relevant projects.
I have followed a similar structure for each company to keep things consistent, but this will evolve over time. Every place was different, and I want to inject more personal detail and assets from my time working at each one. The projects are fairly light at the moment. Some of the cases were already in my portfolio earlier this year, and there is a sense of what is coming, but not all the detail yet. I will be adding to these over the next few weeks.
This is harder than it sounds. I never used to write case studies for my earlier work, and remembering all the detail takes time. Still, I know that simply showing screens does very little to help people understand what was actually done. One thing that has really stood out to me is the sheer scale of work I have done over the years, most of which has never made it into my portfolio. Hopefully, over time, I can capture more of that, because a couple of web design screens do not give any real sense of the work involved.
I have also stopped using Adobe products and am learning Affinity instead. Creating the content I need for the site has been challenging, and there is a lot to learn. I can see plenty of things I do not like yet, but I would rather get something live than have nothing at all, and keep making progress every day.
Realistically, I expect to get through each case study in a couple of days. Based on some very rough maths, I probably have around fifty cases I would like to share eventually, so this will take time. After that, I need to refine my About page, which I recently turned into a real disaster while trying and failing to code some features. That particular experience involved far too much time wrestling with code and ChatGPT, with some heavy handed thrashing of the keyboard and a really strong urge to throw my MacBook against the wall.
Keep checking back. I will continue updating things as I go.