This was a fun project. There was a lot of thinking that went into the re-design of this website (for the 87th time), and after applying some actual research, talking to some leaders of the UX world, and doing user testing, I think I’m finally happy with it.
First of all, this portfolio was created on a 2014 Macbook Pro, built right on top of Zurb’s Foundation 6. I love what the team at Zurb are doing and with all of the consistently great things they put out, I had to try the new build after using Foundation 5 for so long. For web authoring, I used Brackets, an open source editor that gives so much room for play during work.
The typefaces used are the (again, narcissistic) Brandon Grotesque, as well as the lovely Calluna. Both typefaces are implemented through Adobe’s Typekit. I'm usually a huge advocate for Google Fonts, but this time around I wanted to try something different.
A few months before starting this portfolio, I met with Mariah Hay, an industry leader who, at the time worked at a UX consultancy company here in DFW. She reviewed my previous portfolio and gave some great insight on what I did both right and wrong. After that meeting I started doing as much research as I could on UX portfolios, what companies look for when browsing a portfolio, structures and information architecture etc.
One absolutely invaluable resource I used was Gary Anderson's research about user experience portfolios. It really dug deep into what makes a good portfolio great, gave an amazing amount of both qualitative and quantitative results, and provided amazing resources including user scenarios and personas.
After reviewing the research, I went straight at it. I looked at my previous portfolios, looking further into detail about what I did wrong, what I did right, and started designing in the browser. A lot of changes were made, a lot of feedback was received, and I'm still constantly finding little details that I can change. I'm still testing out the website every day or two, but if you're interested in looking at the source code or want to suggest any changes, I'll always have a copy of it on github.