Refreshing My Portfolio Site

I’ll be refreshing and overhauling my personal site at https://ryanarnaudin.com/ in the coming weeks.

This post is a rough outline to guide the update.

Why?

My existing site, ‘v2,’ is nearly seven years old. I’m currently on a sabbatical from full-time work, and this is a key result for finding new work later this year. I have several reasons for initiating a refresh now:

1. As my sabbatical winds down, I’ll be looking for work. A personal site or web portfolio is essential for getting interviews and securing a good UX/Product Design job.
2. The v2 site is outdated:
   • Google’s Material Design, which has evolved over the years, inspired it.
   • The portfolio hasn’t been updated in five years, so it’s missing my work at Brightidea.
3. Recently, I’ve been working as a Product Lead and PM, so I’ve had less hands-on time with tools and technology. This is an opportunity to refamiliarize technically with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jekyll, GitHub, and web hosting during my downtime.
4. It’s a fun design project that I’ve been delaying due to other priorities.

Requirements and Constraints

Many of these remain constant from v2:

1. Provide an overview of the skills and experience that I can leverage to advance an interested compnay.
2. Highlight work samples in a design portfolio for recruiters and hiring managers to become familiar with my process and problem-solving approach.
3. Showcase writing samples to illustrate my thinking process and communitcation style.
   • Other benefits include sharing ideas, preserving knowledge, and practicing writing skills.
4. Provide a way for people to contact me for work opportunities or collaboration.
5. Tech-wise:
   • I plan on sticking with a similar tech stack despite newer options, since I’m familiar with Jekyll, which has served me well. A static site is sufficient for my needs.
   • Keep scripts, plugins, and complexity to a minimum to accomplish the goals.
6. Design-wise:
   • The site should be simple and professional. I prefer dark mode for apps, but a high-contrast, light aesthetic accomplishes the goal best. Fonts, styling, and hierarchy should be minimal yet elegant, to focus the content.
   • As a usability expert, my site must have clear and straightforward navigation and operation. It needs to work well on mobile and desktop. Styling shouldn’t obscure purpose. A pet peeve is portfolio sites that get in the way, or that I can’t effectively navigate.
   • Avoid short-lived trends and aesthetics for a long-lasting, expandable site (purples & pinks, mesh gradients, bubbly and/or 3D effects, dark glassy effects are all hot at the time of writing).

Solution Direction

In keeping with the constraints and principles above, I aim for something like this:

I’ve idenfitied a few open-source Jekyll themes that will get me close. The leading candidate is himatt, unless there are any issues or concerns when I clone the project. Aside from migrating my content, the major tasks would be:

• Change the theme from dark to light.
• Add a blog list and post pages.
• Add an image lightbox that opens large in the same window.

Future Considerations

It’s worth mentioning what might be tempting, but I’m not planning on doing now:

• Image galleries.
• Additional filtering and categorization, e.g. blog or project categories.
• Minimal migration effort now for side projects and hobbies.
• Serve as a landing page and funnel for potential consulting work and/or resources for sale, but aiming for a full-time job.

Follow-up

Before · v2 Material-inspired

After · himatt-forked