colophon

Building my own website is what first gave me a way into design. Before I had much professional experience, the fact that I could make something real mattered. It gave people something to react to, and it gave me a place to learn by making.

I have always enjoyed the technical side of the web: the small details of layout, motion, interaction, and rendering, and the creative ways this material can be shaped into something expressive. Code gave me a different kind of design material to work with, one that could be tested and adjusted directly.

It was also a useful break from the often unclear path of design work. In code, the feedback is more immediate. Something runs or it does not. The layout holds or it breaks. You usually know whether you have reached the place you were trying to get to. Design is rarely that clean.

This site has been changing, in one form or another, for almost ten years. Each version has carried a little of what I was learning at the time: new tools, new work, new interests, and new ways of explaining myself. The canvas sketches have followed that same path, moving from small Pts.js experiments into something closer to the site's visual language.

The site is never quite finished, partly because portfolios never are. It is a record of work, but also a reflection of the person making it, and that keeps moving.

The way I build it has changed dramatically. Earlier versions were written much more directly, one line at a time, with long stretches of searching, debugging, and slowly figuring out how the pieces fit together. Now AI is part of the process, and the first version of an idea can appear much faster.

That has not made the work automatic. If anything, it has made judgment more important. I spend less time fighting the blank file and more time shaping, correcting, and deciding whether the result actually matches what I meant.

This version is built with Next.js, React, Tailwind CSS, Framer Motion, and Pts.js, a creative coding library by William Ngan. The type uses Corda, designed by Dieter Hofrichter, Public Sans, an open source sans-serif developed for USWDS, with colors adapted from Flexoki by Steph Ango.