I am a Swiss Knife!

Here is the story of a UI/UX designer who coded her portfolio.

An ongoing job hunt and a pandemic make for a heavy combination. Therefore, I believe that people are better off when they get different types of skills in their arsenal because then you’re constantly pushing into areas that you’re not 100% familiar with. It’s certainly a less comfortable route to take, but it’s way more rewarding. You become more of a Swiss army knife than a single-serve.

Working as a founder, expanded my horizon towards psychology. I understood the nature of the market and consumer behavior. It turns out to me that if you spend time doing a lot of different things over enough years, you can become surprisingly good at them. You can even find connections — ways different knowledge sets overlap — that a specialist might never see. This is what even Robert Heinlein would have meant today when he said, ‘Specialization is for insects.’

I coded my design portfolio. My vision behind doing so was to experiment and have the freedom to design something that is entirely my own. As the existing portfolio makers looked way similar and boring to me.

💡Ideation

◾ Watched various tutorials available on YouTube. Especially that of Tanay Pratap (software engineer at Microsoft).

◾ Joined a Discord server of coders to discuss my queries.

◾ Launched the website through ‘netlify.com’

👀 Key highlights-

1. Horizontal scrolling to make it stand out from the rest of the portfolios.
2. Tried to have more impact with fewer words — Crisp visuals
3. Easy scanning.
4. To get more conversions — I decided to have ‘Collab’ as a primary CTA on the header so that it gets the client’s attention.
5. Coherent layout — every section tells a story about me, my work, and the interests that I have.
6. Experimented with the layout and for showcasing the projects that I have worked on.
7. The idea behind also keeping a dragger CTA on the header was to highlight those sections on the portfolio so that the main purpose of coming to the website was fructified.

Glimpse of the code and the final design

🤓 Takeaways

Being a UI/UX Designer, when I started learning HTML and CSS to code my portfolio, I was able to grasp the possibilities the language offers which can help me to create designs that could be more possible to get coded.

Knowing even a basic level of HTML and CSS allowed me to craft a tailored message that can reach the entire world. Once you know these, you can reach anyone on the World Wide Web to communicate, make a point, take a stand, market your skillset, and do lots of other things. Yes, Quora, Facebook, and YouTube are nice and can reach lots of people, but none of these can be so specifically tailored the way that a web page can be.

That’s a wrap I hope you found it insightful. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, Instagram or website.

Thank you for reading till the end! Did you know? You can hold that clap button for a few seconds to give a maximum of 50 claps. I would really appreciate it. See ya!