How I built this site

This whole page is a bit long because I believe design is for everyone! Especially with the tools we have access to today, I think that anyone is capable of building cool and creative things — it's just a matter of knowing how to use everything.

Below, I'm walking through the whole process: how I actually think and work (scrapped ideas, notes-app chaos, and all), where AI fit in — and very much didn't — how I planned and researched before touching Figma, the interaction decisions I made along the way, and the hand-drawn assets and animations that ended up being the most time-consuming (BUT most fun) part of the whole thing.

To me, a portfolio shouldn't just be a vehicle to display a designer's work. Instead, it should showcase who the designer is at their core (and also, of course, display their work). That's why I only used AI with more menial tasks related to optimizing my workflow — like organizing tasks/feedback, tracking progress, setting deadlines, replicating pages, basic layouts, compressing or cropping images, and coding — instead of it fully doing the work for me and producing AI slop. Because of this, I made sure the portfolio truly reflected my own thinking.

One of my FAVORITE quotes that constantly drives my curiosity and passion for design is from Austin Kleon's book, Steal Like An Artist: "If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research."

So before even starting to design my portfolio, I stalked so many portfolios and combined them in a document where I noted down specific interactions (take a look here!) — heads up, I ended up taking my actual notes out, so it's really just a list of the portfolios I looked at with links to each. I found that the most helpful portfolios were the ones that detailed their process and thought process behind their designs — so I hope to do the same!

After talking with Bruce Cao, he asked me a lot of thought-provoking questions like, "What are the fish supposed to tell me about YOU?" which pivoted the way I viewed portfolios as a whole and led me to creating something that truly felt like "me."

I wanted to fill the site with fun, playful interactions, but I also wanted them to be noticeable enough that people would actually stop and engage with them — without going so far that it felt overstimulating.

This is probably where I poured the most time into the whole project — every little doodle and drawing here is hand-drawn.

The animations are hand-drawn too, frame by frame. I had zero prior animation experience, so I leaned on Pinterest references to figure it out. Once I got the hang of it, though, I had so much fun coming up with new illustrations to add (this one is my current favorite).