[Portfolio] Brandon Wang, version 5.0

Yet another redesign of my personal portfolio: the highlights that made it such a great design (at least in my opinion), and why I unfortunately discontinued the design.

This web page made use of intensive colors, dark backgrounds, and visually stunning effects. It really pushed out the fact that, this person here is a designer.

The menu bar.

The menu bar has absolutely no text elements; it is completely encompassed of images spirited together so that on hover (see the contact button above in the screenshot) it will have a lovely fade. In addition, when a page is active, the text will be highlighted with a darker area (not pictured).

The incredibly large header.

Most of the area above the fold is taken up by the extremely large header, which, while taking up a whopping more than 400 pixels of height, doesn’t state much than “Design matters. I can help.” Below the large text is smaller text. And that’s it.

It was an effect that I really wanted to try out on a website design: a extremely large header that didn’t say much. Some people call it a waste of space. I call it marketing.

There’s also a Twitter box on the top right of this large area. Originally, I had planned to place this large box in the area where the menu is; in essence, have the two blocks swap. But that would present a new design.

Since there was so much space in the gradient, I decided it wouldn’t exactly hurt to have the block of text on top of the gradient. This proved out to work very well with the Twitter logo, and if Twitter is down, it gracefully degrades with the message “Twitter is loading…”

The bottom areas.

I really wanted to point out the bottom part with some omph, so I started the top section with a green-highlighted section pointing out some skills that I had.

I then moved on to the bottom section, where I presented pretty much the same text I have had for the last few designs, and then finished it off with a few screenshots at some of my works on the right side. It’s decent, but it’s simple at the same time and works well for me.

So why was it discontinued?

To be honest, it’s a question I can’t answer very easily. To say it as simply as I can, it wasn’t me. I’ve coded a lot of projects, and each project required a right look and feel. A church website wouldn’t look great if it looked like something from a rock band (unless you are a church that can do it right).

Therefore, sometime two weeks after coding the home page and I started getting started with the inner pages, I decided that the design wasn’t simply me. I wasn’t the type who had dark colors and huge impacts. I decided that I was someone who liked minimalistic monochrome colors, someone who liked color accents but not big blobs of color on a design.

What’s next?

I came out with a new design a month later, which you can read about on my portfolio or blog.