Portfolio Redesign

Overview

My portfolio became a product-design problem.

I started this project because my portfolio no longer represented the way I work. My role had evolved beyond producing interfaces. Much of the value I bring comes from understanding complex problems, connecting user needs with business goals and technical realities, and helping teams create clarity around what to do next. That meant the challenge was not simply to redesign a website. I needed to reconsider what the portfolio needed to communicate, who it needed to serve and how different people might move through it. This changed the project from a visual refresh into a product-design exercise.

The problem

My work had evolved. My portfolio needed to catch up.

The previous portfolio could show examples of my work, but it did not clearly communicate the way I approach product problems today. At the same time, the people evaluating a portfolio do not all arrive with the same needs or the same amount of time. A recruiter may want to understand my experience and relevance very quickly. A design or product leader may want much more evidence of how I think, make decisions, navigate trade-offs and collaborate. The experience therefore needed to work at more than one level.

Discovery

Before designing pages, I needed to understand what the portfolio had to communicate.

Because this was my own portfolio, discovery started by stepping away from the interface. Before deciding what pages or components I needed, I focused on three questions:

Strategy

Different visitors need different levels of depth.

The most important insight was that the portfolio should not force every visitor through the same journey. The experience needed to support quick evaluation while rewarding people who wanted to understand the work more deeply.

Design for scanning. Reward deeper exploration.

The resulting strategy was to create layers of information. Someone should be able to understand my positioning from the homepage, browse selected projects for relevance and then decide whether to explore a case study, my working approach or my background in more depth. The portfolio does not require everyone to read everything. Instead, each layer answers a different question and creates a clear path to the next level of detail.

Key decisions

Turning strategy into decisions.

Once the audience, positioning and experience strategy were clear, I used them as criteria for the decisions that followed - from what belonged on the homepage to how projects should be structured and how much information to reveal at each level. Rather than treating those decisions as isolated design choices, I documented the reasoning behind them, including the alternatives considered, trade-offs and expected impact.

Solution

A connected portfolio experience.

The final outcome is a responsive portfolio system designed to communicate my positioning, selected work and approach to product design at different levels of depth. The deliverables included:

From design to code

Exploring a different way of building.

I also used the redesign as an opportunity to understand more of the development side of product work. Rather than completing the entire portfolio as static designs and treating implementation as a separate step, I moved between product decisions, visual direction, content and working code. The portfolio is built with Next.js and React, with Git and GitHub supporting version control. AI-assisted development became part of that workflow - not as a replacement for design judgement, but as a way to move between intent and implementation more directly.

Reflection

Designing for yourself still requires constraints.

Working on my own portfolio made one thing particularly clear: when you are both the designer and the stakeholder, it is easy to keep exploring indefinitely. Defining the audience, positioning and strategy gave me criteria for deciding what belonged - and, just as importantly, what did not. The project also changed how I think about the boundary between design and development. Working closer to implementation made the consequences of design decisions more visible and reinforced the value of reusable patterns, structured content and clear constraints. AI made parts of execution faster, but it did not remove the need for judgement. I still needed to recognise when something was not working, understand why and decide what should change. The portfolio is still evolving - intentionally. Like any product, it can continue to improve as I add new work, learn from how people use it and refine the story I want it to tell.