Most portfolio sites are built to get you through a timeline as quickly as possible. I wanted mine to feel more like wandering through a place that happens to contain my work.
The first screen
The WebGL galaxy sets the tone before there is anything to read. It gives the page depth and movement, then gets out of the way. The rest of the site is deliberately calmer, so the background feels like an atmosphere instead of a distraction.
The way things open
Names and labels resolve through decryption animations because a plain fade felt too easy. The expanding sections work the same way. They let you choose how much detail you want at a time, which keeps a long page from feeling like a wall of information.
The work underneath
The education section is a CSS-built record of the degrees I have earned. The experience section takes a cue from LinkedIn by keeping the important facts easy to scan. Projects stay simple, with direct links when there is somewhere useful to go, and the skills are just icons instead of another paragraph trying to explain what an icon already says.
The gallery
The gallery is my favourite part. It is connected directly to folders in my Google Drive, so I can add photos from my phone whenever I feel like it. You can catch slideshow previews from the main page or scroll through each collection in full. The layout borrows a lot from VSCO: simple, image-first, and happy to let the photos do the talking.