Why you should start a portfolio project
The story of my online portfolio
After returning from my short holiday in Thailand last March, I too was slapped in the face with the grim reality of the corona pandemic like the rest of the world. I like to keep my hands busy, but now all my afterwork activities like gym, badminton, meeting friends or my latest endeavor, Finnish language classes, have disappeared from my life.
I had been planning to work on my portfolio for quite a while already, but never had enough time. Now, with so much free time on my hands, it was the right opportunity to get started. Looking back on the first lockdown, I understand the significance of my portfolio project to the fullest. It wasn’t only beneficial professionally — building my portfolio kept me busy through the whole spring. It helped me come to terms with the total isolation and find meaning in it. I managed to put all of my worries to the side.
Why do you need a portfolio?
Having a standout portfolio is a must for all consultants, and Intergalacticans aren’t an exception. Intergalactico encourages its employees to work on their portfolios between customer projects as it not only helps the sales but is also a great self-development tool.
While the main goal of a portfolio is to demonstrate a person’s skills in particular areas, creating one also helps to deepen them through learning new methods and techniques. You can’t avoid learning something new if you only rely on yourself in all aspects of your work.
After launching my portfolio, I clearly noticed how my skills in both design and development had improved. I learned several new approaches to coding that made my life as a developer much easier. I also became aware of new patterns to avoid in digital design, not to mention the fact that I enhanced my personal stack by trying out several new technologies. Likewise, it was a good exercise in structuring and systemizing content and creating something meaningful out of a pile of chaotic material.
How I begun my portfolio project
I started from scratch
To save time, you can always find a ready-made template for your portfolio. However, I personally didn’t want to limit myself from either a design or development perspective. The opportunity to improve and learn new skills was actually one of my main motivators for building the portfolio. That is why I decided to create something unique, built entirely by me. I also like to believe that portfolios built from scratch have the potential to stand out more.
I gathered initial design ideas
A portfolio is supposed to show both your skills and personality. Keep that in mind when working on initial sketches and drawings. When I started, I had plenty of ideas and almost all of them were focused on combining a clean, neat black-and-white layout, which would represent the “tech” side of my personality, with something bright and unexpected for my “art” side. My first thought was to work with fractals, since those are a perfect representation of Math and Art working together.
To put my ideas on “paper”, I decided to use Adobe Illustrator; however, you can use whichever tool and technique you prefer. I ended up spending some time learning how to create fractals in Illustrator and experimenting with them in design. Funnily enough, I didn’t end up using any of these in the final layouts. This is a normal part of the design process and you should not be afraid of it.
I played with the ideas and tested them
This stage will be individual for everyone. The main point is to build your ideas and test them out in order to come up with the final concept for your portfolio.
From initial sketching, I came up with an idea of many floating fractals that looked like microorganisms in the deep ocean. I applied a parallax effect to them, and this layered animation worked out pretty well at first. However, since fractals contain so many details, they are not really suitable for complex animations. My colleagues and friends helped me to spot this issue during UX testing, which I have done after finalising the first version of the background animation. I received valuable feedback, which helped me improve both design and technical implementation.
After some additional experiments with animation, I eventually chose to opt for playful bubbles that you can currently see on my website in the hero and footer sections. This animation is done with a combination of React and Sass.
Feel free to check the bubble animation from this Pen Portfolio Bubbles by Elena Kazakova (@jphawk) on CodePen
I selected a technical setup
While looking for the best design solution, you should also pick and test different tech setups.
Since I wanted to master my React skills, this library became an obvious choice. However, choosing a content management system (CMS) for my project took some time and research. I was interested in using a headless solution and initially considered opting for Contentful, which I had already used in several other projects. After some investigation, I decided to try GraphCMS, the GraphQL native headless CMS. GraphCMS was easy to pick up and it is quite flexible for various coding experiments. Their API playground is also a great feature for painless testing of GraphQL queries and trying out new approaches.
Then I took my portfolio live
Once my portfolio was ready locally, I bought a domain name and SSL certificate at NameCheap and deployed my app at Heroku. I had done a similar deployment several times previously, but was happy to discover that Heroku had significantly reduced the number of necessary steps for going live since I had last used the service. After only a half an hour, my app was available at elena-kazakova.pro. Feel free to check it out!
Even though going live is the first big goal, and a huge milestone for me personally, the work is not over. Actually, the work should never be over. Every time I visit the app, I see plenty of things that could be improved and I randomly fix them here and there. I have already started drawing sketches for some possible redesigns. I’m also considering adding new sections. But that is the fun part — as you progress, your portfolio progresses. Whatever other interesting challenges and learnings it brings is up to you.
If you have a portfolio project in mind, don’t hesitate to start it! I can guarantee that you will learn something new, not to mention the process itself will be exciting.
