Portfolio for days
No, you aren't dreaming. It's finally happened!
Three or four years ago, I started building a portfolio site to show off some of my work. I built the site in WordPress before getting distracted by life and eventually ditching it. I picked it back up again two years ago and rebuilt the site in ExpressionEngine. I nearly finished it this time too, but I couldn't be bothered to write all the content. I parked it and went on my merry way.
Cut to April of this year. A surge of productivity came over me. I was gonna do it! And for real this time. I had a finished version of the ExpressionEngine site. All I needed was to get all the images together and write some words. I didn't do any of that. Instead, I rebuilt the site again in Next.js. I'm a fucking mess.
It's such a pain in the arse building a site for yourself, especially one that doesn't have an imposed deadline. It's open-ended. Me being me, I spent a lot of time designing and redesigning the site based on what I thought looked good that week. It wasn't sustainable. That was the first hurdle. In the end, I set a deadline. I wanted it done by summer.
The second hurdle was collating the stuff I've done over the years. I found an HDD with backups going back twenty years. Surprisingly, some of this didn't even look like dog shit. Most of it did. I wanted this site to cover the process and reasoning behind my work, Instagram is for my one-offs, so the work needed to be substantial. I went back through the years to pick pieces that I liked but also that others might want to look at. Whittling down years of work to a handful of projects was difficult.
But I got there in the end. I laid out a content plan, ticking off the elements of each project as I went along. Written stuff. Done. Images and mockups. Done. This project that I really can't be arsed to write up. Off the list. The result is a site I'm finally happy with that shows off a bunch of stuff that I'm glad to have created.
What's next? It's nice to finish a project that I started four years ago. It feels like a weight has lifted. I can now focus on doing some other creative bits. Become an artist? An author? An indie game developer? Or maybe I could redesign my blog.
