New Portfolio in the Works.

I’ve always wanted a cool, chibi-style profile picture for my portfolio, but I've never been good at drawing. I even tried paying for art commissions, but nothing really worked out. So, my portfolio always ended with text for the logo.

Then, OpenAI released a new Ghibli-style image generator, and it could turn any portrait photo into Ghibli-style art! I got so excited and tried it right away.

Ghibi-style generated via OpenAI

And it's awesome! I got inspired to immediately start designing a portfolio landing page. I checked my Pinterest boards, looking at old pins and searching for new ideas. I found this amazing portfolio design on Figma and was instantly captivated.

Design inspiration from Figma community by 三秋十李Sergio.

I really liked the vibe of it. I’ve never been good at putting into words what I like about this, but I think it’s the modern and techy style that’s capturing me.

Right away, I knew this was the style I wanted to try next. The original design was a bit too detailed and cold for me, and I wanted something a little warmer, so that's what I went for.

Even though I’m more intuitive when designing in Figma, I still use Inkscape for my casual projects. It gives me more flexibility with gradients and tools that make it easy to create design elements. After sitting for hours, nudging shapes pixel by pixel, I finally made my not-so-final draft. Honestly, I'm really happy with how it turned out! There's still a lot to fix and improve, and I'll definitely work on the legibility, but I'm already pretty happy with the look. It's far from done, but it's really coming along.

The text are tight and I was exploring the design for the next section. I didn't commit to this though

Finally, I was satisfied with this. Some elements are too thin but it's getting there.

I've even been trying to make it work on different screen sizes, which has turned out to be a big challenge. I'll probably have to keep exploring the layout next time. Here's a little peek at how the mobile version is looking. I've also been playing with animations, like making the background fade in slowly, and it turned out pretty cool!

Mobile-version in development of the new design

I don't plan on replacing my current site with this, but it’s nice to see a new design coming together. I'll host it on a separate site once I have the time. More than anything, I’m just happy and excited about this sudden inspiration and the joy of building this design as an experiment.