Modelling this site before designing it

Every portfolio I built before this one died of redesign, so this one started as a list of fields.

My portfolio has been rebuilt more times than I can count, and every version died the same death: adding new work meant redesigning something, so new work stopped being added. For a client I would never have accepted that. For my own site I accepted it for a decade.

So this build started in the least glamorous place possible: a list of fields. Before any layout existed, every project and every note was defined as a record with the same handful of properties, and the pages came later, as readers of those records. It felt like being made to do paperwork before being allowed to paint.

It changed everything downstream. A layout that has to hold a photo essay and a platform case study without special cases has to be built on the content’s real shape, and those constraints quietly did most of the art direction. When something broke, we fixed the template, never the content. The site I actually keep current is the one that is boring to update.

The full anatomy is in the This Site case study. The part that travels is smaller: treat your own work with the discipline you sell. It took me an embarrassingly long time.