I've had my own website as a landing page for a really long time. For the longest time it's just been a single page with links to GitHub and LinkedIn and a brief description of who I am. But over time, as I've done ceramics, design work, and other projects, I've wanted to use it as more of a portfolio rather than just a landing page. So I set out to redesign it in a format that allowed me to attach more content, look cleaner, and represent my personal brand in a more accurate way.
It had to be simple and easy to look at, so I ended up sticking with black and white. I also wanted the simplicity to be reflected in how the website works and looks—no complicated navigation, just a few headers.
I did want a bit of movement to show visual interest in the website, so I made sure there would be some small animations. You can see that reflected in the headers and in some of the other buttons around the site.
This redesign also came at the end of me designing my own maker's mark for ceramics specifically and finding that it actually could be applied to a website and digital footprint quite well. The logo I designed myself—it's supposed to be an A and a G together, where the G covers the whole logo and the A is just on the left side. I found it to be best abstracted into a form that I could stamp into my ceramics as a mark of my personal craftsmanship.
In the redesign, I wanted to make sure I could have a website that required very little maintenance and allowed me to get my thoughts from pen to screen as quickly as possible. To implement that, I made sure that all the text formatting could be written in Markdown and could just be dropped in the repo and rendered out programmatically with pretty
This was the part of the website I had Anthropic's Claude help me with quite a bit. I had the design and a format that I liked, and I was able to take that and apply it to the project screen and the ceramic screen to create a page that I thought meshed with my existing brand guidelines quite well. It was also capable of doing a lot of the groundwork of making sure that images rendered correctly and that formatting met accessibility guidelines, which was great.
Overall, it allowed me to spend more time and thought writing out the articles for the website and working on my ceramics hobby. It also served well as a way for me to mess around with Claude in different ways, working it into different workflows and seeing how it could allow me to build out my ideas much faster.