Every portfolio on the internet

I've seen a lot of portfolio sites. I've made a bunch of my own based on looking at others until my eyes blurred. The result has been that they almost all bleed together in my head, including my own.

The structure includes a buzz word laden tag line referring to industry trends. What's this decade's version of "pixel perfect"? Metric driven? Product driven? Something driving something else in general.

And then cramming portfolio hints above the fold, because you believe that's what matters. The work matters more than any articulation of yourself as a human being. Outcomes, not you as a human that other humans will work with day after day.

Yuck.

It's a tired pattern. It feels like designing for everyone and ending up grabbing no one. So I'm trying something different.

Here's a toy to play with

My kid nephew came by a few months ago and asked me where my toys were. And I told him I didn't have any. No physical ones anyways, just video games, and nothing simple. Nothing to just pick up and experiment with.

This hero section is kind of inspired by that. Reflecting on "play" as a thing we lose more and more of as we get older.

I wanted this to grab and hold someone's attention for more than a few seconds. To not throw buzzwords at them for a few seconds, and just get them to draw something that will disappear in seconds. Play.

I started learning Spline a few weeks before, and I was excited to learn the possibilities and constraints of the tool, and of 3d on the web.

The constraints really stuck with me. Technical limitations, performance issues, and interaction boundaries of embedding this onto a website. I tried a lot of variations, and at one point intended to have several Spline embeds on one page.

In my initial tests browser performance absolutely tanked. Multiple embeds feels like a bad idea for now, especially with varying device targets. Then I explored embedding several into a single embed. That didn't feel right either. It performed better, but the website portion felt lost. It was just a rich embed, pulling focus from the space it was embedded into.

So here's what I ended up with. A simple, minimalistic, but almost meditative interaction. Something that works if you don't touch it, but works a whole lot better when you do.

I knew it felt right when I spent a few minutes drawing ephemeral shapes in the particle dust, only to see them drift away after a few seconds.

Show, don't tell

This is what you're told to practice when creating stories. And it's a hard thing to do in any medium.

A playful interaction is my attempt at telling you what I'm about. What I care about and what I'm interested in. To connect with others through interactive work.

I hope it works. It's not for everyone, and I think that's a good thing.