#redesign2016

WHAT’S OLD IS NEW AGAIN . . . AND AGAIN

Redesigning my website always feels like when someone asks me what my favorite movie is or who my favorite artist is, etc. I have to pick one thing to represent myself?  That’s so limiting! To solve that feeling of design claustrophobia, I usually redesign my portfolio completely every year. I’ve had a professional website since 2011 and without fail, every year I redesign and redevelop how it looks, how it’s shaped, the UX flow and design ephemera for that year.

2016 was a huge year of growth for me in my professional work. I worked on projects that employ new web standards and practices. Using this knowledge I’ve applied new style standards and atomic design and development, BEM specificity, and I became extremely comfortable using Github to improve my file versioning and Gulp to compile and streamline my SCSS workflow. With all these tools at my disposal I knew this year my portfolio redesign strategy had to be different. I wanted to make it so that I don’t have to tear down and ditch my old sites as I go forward, but rather build them with a structure that’s flexible for future iterations, improvements, extensions and enhancements.

Before I could even begin to think about the design of my new site I knew I had to treat my site like any other project I would take on – by using my design and development workflow. My workflow starts with research of the “client”, the product and the customer or user. Next would be mood boards and sketching. Then would come mocks and development exploration. And finally, development implementation.