It was the 12th of March, 2022, I was surfing the web as usual during my pomodoro break. (Kidding, I am not a pomodoro break person.) All of sudden, I came across the bookmarks for the site that I kept as design inspirations. To be exact, there were two of them.

For a while, I was planning to upgrade my old portfolio site which I created a few years back. But as you might know if you've seen it, it's pretty odd and looks nothing more than a little passion project. So I've been planning for a fresh upgrade.

The two sites that I explicitly bookmarked as part of my design inspirations were Lee Robinson's Portfolio & The Minimalists Blog.

The reason these two caught my eye was because they both had a lot of design elements that I wanted to keep as a part of my portfolio. Like, I've always loved the narrow layout & typography of The Minimalists' blog. The Minimalist's logo is one of it's kind and I wanted to keep it as part of my portfolio. Lee Robinson's Portfolio has that genius Guestbook feature that I shamelessly stole from his portfolio and integrated one of my own iteration of it on this site. I've also been a fan of Lee Robinson's Portfolio's design. Lee's site is built using Next.js, which is a React framework that I've been using for a while. So I've been planning to upgrade my portfolio site to React.js or Next.js as well.

To keep in mind, while I am certainly influenced by the designs of those sites, I was on the plan to completely do the work on my own using my own set of expertise, stack and the logic. So, the day I started to code this site was the second day of my second semester midterms (if I remember correctly). I was planning to make this site a little bit more interactive and fun afterall I was almost planning to fuse together two whole design inspirations and few of my old project elements.

Because it was my portfolio site and I had almost no deadline to it, I started off without any UI layouts. Although, to be fair I kinda already had my UI layouts; The Minimalists.

I chose React and skipped the Next.js part because a-lot of my old components & hooks that I was gonna use on this site were built with React and I was too lazy for whole another step of code refactoring. So, I started off with a simple layout and spent few days working on various components of Home page (Yeah, few days).

After few days of work, I was able to make it look more like a portfolio. Unlike previous projects, this time I actually went with the UI first and spent a lot of time on the layout. I also added some little quirks and easter eggs to the site which I'd love to challenge you to find out and share 'em around.

So, I guess that's almost it about the design inspirations. I hope you'll find this site as a part of your design inspiration too. Very soon, I'll take the source code of this site public. Till then, I have listed the mini-stack that I used to make this site below.