Katarina’s website

5 min readFeb 20, 2023

December 2017

I had just discovered Industrial design and started to do some sketches. Alongside that, I created my first design project Dryr, was working on Creatr and started to write my first blog post (‘Why complexity is essential’). And then my brother suggested to create a website to host all of these and upcoming projects in order to share them with other people. So I created a mockup of what I wanted it to look like.

June 2018

I then learned the basics of html and CSS and after a lot of trial and error finally pushed. This screenshot is the only thing that remains from that first design.

March 2020

I noticed that my website was really outdated. I had created so many other things I’m really passionate about and just wanted to share them. I had also discovered product design a couple of months before that and really wanted to make sure that I could display all of my future projects from this field. So I created some mockups again, resulting in a more complex design at first.

After realizing that this design was too noisy for my taste, I created a cleaner version.

A weekend of coding and some nights of tweaks later: here is that version of my website.

June 2020

I decided to improve my website again. On a visual side my main goals were to refine the typography, emphasize the visuals more and create icons myself to establish one style across the entire site. Additionally, I tackled the “more” page. Not only did I want to find a better way to organize the content, I also wanted to make this page more visible as these many side projects were often overlooked.
These are some of the new key elements.

November 2020

After taking a step back from my website for a couple of months, I had new refinement ideas for a visual refresh. So I sketched rough wireframes of the components and implemented the code within a couple of days.

Over the next few feeks, I kept tweaking minor details to perfect the font sizes, margins, colors and more. I removed the text in the projects tab and the buttons on the portfolio page to create a more minimalist look. I also increased margins to create more whitespace and added a back to top button and dates to the bottom of projects.

April 2021

As a product designer, I care about the user experience with digital products and my website is no different. I wasn’t fully content with with the experience of my website so I revised the layout to enable easier navigation, increase the visibility of all of my projects while highlighting my best work. I created a Figma file with my website designs (yay finally!) and a personal design system just for the fun of it.

After some tinkering, I came up with the visual design as a foundation for my code.

It was way overdue for me to create clearer and more adaptable code so I created my refined website from scratch.

Some nights and weekends of coding later, I was finally able to publish my new and improved design.

January 2022

I lost track of what I did there… ops. It was probably more updates.

September 2022

I mostly worked on portfolio posts and adding summary sections to the top.

February 2023

I changed the visuals to represent myself better and optimized the website experience — especially for viewing my portfolio and reading about projects. These are my Figma designs so they aren’t 100% accurate.