As a Class Project for CFA we were given the task to create a portfolio to showcase our present and upcoming work. This was also an opportunity to show our creativity and personality.
- A thoughtfully written bio.
- Portfolio section for your projects.
- A way to contact you.
- Attitude/Quirkiness
- Hiroku Deployment.
I came up with a list of outcomes that I wanted and went to design the wireframes. The outcomes were as follows:
- A clean, clutter-free look.
- An opening photo, an "About me" section, "projects" section, and a contacts section.
- After the intitial photo, I wanted to use icons and boxes to keep it simple.
- Something that was easy to modify when my skills and number of projects increased.
- As I was telling a story, I wanted to have a book effect where every section was a page of a book.
I used the bookblock plugin to give the effect of the page turning. Whilst being a cool effect, it gave me a lot of trouble in terms of customisation and implementation to rails.
The projects and About me sections were pretty straightforward, although my work up until now has been very minimal. The education and work sections I felt were necessary as its gives the feeling of who I am, and who I was before my coding journey began.
- I am a big fan of flat design and wanted to use lots of images and icons. The issue with this was there is very limited amount of free icons out there so I had to scale back and use vector icons instead.
- Because of the Bookblock plugin, I was unable to use bootstrap so had to rely solely on flexy boxes for the majority of my structure and responsiveness.
- I took a long time deliberating each design style and idea and wasted a lot of time doing this.
- As previously mentioned, the bookblock plugin and related javascript was niggly to customise. Aside from taking an age to get sorted into Rails, any CSS and HTML changes were usually accompanied by more issues.
- The contact form at the end is currently not working. We will be taught this in class and will update accordingly.
- There was so much to learn and implement in this project that I would often go off in tangents and explore different design ideas that were unnecessary for this actual project.