I’ve put off designing my digital portfolio for a lot of reasons: Carbonmade made me lazy, there are free WordPress themes that do the trick, and investing time in something I’m not 1) being paid for, or 2) collaborating with people on… it simply doesn’t appeal to me very much.

After giving a lecture on designing digital portfolios, however, I felt like it was high time to step up my game a little bit. Here’s the first iteration of my design. It’s very plain and basic because when I first do a mockup I’m trying to lay a nice CSS foundation and get layout and colors working together.

A lot of people seem to make initial mockups in Photoshop, that wild frontier of the imagination. You can lay out something really amazing, but then you’re tasked with figuring out how to actually build it. I prefer a more bottom-up approach to mockups. More prototype-y. Perhaps it’s from growing up watching my dad build things with wood and metal; perhaps it’s from overzealous knowledge of my own limitations… I really don’t know. But this approach seems to work well for me, and it avoids the distress of not being able to realize a Photoshop pipe dream in standards-compliant code.

Larger version.

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