the timing of it

Well i got a course assignment that mandated its creation. Always wanted to make a website to would catalogue my work. something as a personal archive for myself. so a lovely coincidence i suppose.

I have a history of picking up on tech stuff quite fast. during my diploma days, I did studied on web designing on the side due to having roommates studying a major in web development and programming. the College was.. quite archaic in methods of teaching on the basis of “understanding your roots” so this would leave the students having a lot of paper trail notes lying around which i picked up (hihi).

Reference Hunting

since i am a now designated “Artist” due to my choice of study, i have to think about how to showcase those skills of mine, mainly in 3D and storytelling. i also wanted to showcase my skills as a programmer too (still aiming to be a game designer btw).

i was aiming for something of a gallery look, a showcase of my artwork, my animations and other projects. best way to do that is through making a website from scratch. I looked into to do this but most options wasnt appealing such as;

• behance > too generic
• linkedin > too stiff
• Wix > watermark (Ick vibes)

then i found the portfolio website of a developer of a software that i used a few semesters ago, veodtube’s Olmewe. They had such a simplistic yet elegant way of showcasing their stuff. all of it was impressive on a visual level, every page had something cool. funnily enough the code wasnt the most standard thing yet it did is job. so I kept this page as my main reference.

then else? i thought of animation concept artist. looked for some that worked on shows i recognized. i found SavanConcepts/Megan Phonesavanh. She worked on Infinity Train and Velma. this page showed the kind of thing that would wow an audience in the artistic level. so I kept this in mind as well.

i did try to look for 3D artist websites but most just use Artstation. so no luck there.

Dive into production

ive started with a mindset of:

• finding a website that can host of free
• something to base of the website from to make it easy to work with

found out things called Static websites exist. these can be hosted on Github Pages, which is free, but have the caveat of needing to code yourself. well it suits my needs so why not code once more!

ive used HUGO, a framework mixes Markdown (.md) and html which simplifies website by making things more modular. I had to relearn again on how to work with HTML, Javascript and as well as the CSS wizardry, so self-taught perseverance all the way. YIPEee. lucky im not totally rusty for this project due to me involved in minecraft modding a few months back.

ive learned that when designing a website requires a lot of retrospective view on how you yourself would interact with websites. UX basically. since it is made for others to see, i had to design it where its quite easy to navigate and know where you are at any given moment. easy way to see it is just to view it all like a blog, you got homepage, list page and the post page. its all about arranging it to Not look like a blog.

Olmewe had this section called Notes like this one. kind of weird having a blog section in your portfolio website but then i read through the entries. This section gave a lot of insight on how that person thinks.. bad and good i suppose. if i was a recruiter or client i would be interested in that kind of stuff so i decided to mimic that as well.

i forgot i need to host the images on a platform other than github. flooding it with files wont be the best of idea due to how small a free repos are.What i was looking for was a CDN. I started with testing with Microsoft OneDrive due it being University standard (who knows might be better i was wrong). I ended up using Google Drive cause its more reliable and got AppScript to automate the embedding process.

lastly i tried to experiment on how to style this website, sure its frivolous but fun to do plus it future proofs for my future self with more artwork and upcoming projects.

tasting victory

all and all, its a fun project kinda helps me see how far i came since i started on my journey i suppose. collecting those images really did became walk down memory lane. the fact i could make this website in a week (the rest are just done to touch up the designs) is already a testament to that.