Feature Log

The home page had to tell my story at a glance, so I rebuilt it from a blank page around my résumé, then made every page say where you came from and where to go next.

• Home is now a timeline in 4 acts, from learning the craft to building with AI, one card each, read left to right.
• The act names build on each other: Designing, then Design + Business, then Design + Business + AI.
• The hero's tiles break away into the cards on the first scroll, and play back quicker on the way home.
• The notch follows the timeline, naming each act and its year.
• Scroll back on the first card and the row stretches as a ring fills under the notch; full, it shakes, and letting go takes you home.
• Every page ends on a Next button, so the site reads as one loop: Dee Product, Auxtail, Tekion, Archive, Playground, Visual Design, My Story, and round again.
• Each case study ends on a banner for the next one, its picture blending into the card.
• A project inside a case study opens as a sheet over it, and closes back to the exact spot it was opened from.
• Work, from any page, lands back on the card you left from.
• Archive and playground cards grow into the page they open.
• The search panel turned white, and its placeholder cycles through what you can search for.
• The search sheet on a phone drags down to close, from anywhere on it.
• The home welcome says which visitor you are, counted by the site's own analytics.
• Every page checked at 9 screen sizes, from a small phone to a wide desktop, and the phone fixes that turned up.
• Search engines now read who the site is about: every spelling of my name, my profiles, and B2B SaaS in the titles.
• Back from the showreel closes the film instead of leaving the page.
• The résumé opens on a summary in my own words.
• The sign off at the end of home copies my email in one tap.
• Fixed the footer flowers not answering the cursor on the résumé.
• Fixed the arrow keys stepping the page behind the search while it was open.

2 pieces of motion on other designers' sites that I wanted to understand by rebuilding them.

• Grok Bot Notch: a study of Novra's Grokbot case study, from its greeting to its selected states.
• Focus Spiral: a study of the hero on The Content Architecture's site.

I gave the live site to friends to use, sat with the list they handed back, and started working through it.

• Made it obvious which résumé rows open, instead of leaving you to find out by clicking.
• Awards now open to show the context behind each one.
• Link each certificate out to the place that issued it.
• The location on the résumé opens in maps.
• Mute the showreel's music when you leave it for another section.
• Bring the cursor bent flowers to tablet, for the same small pleasure they give on a desktop.
• Bring the flowers to phones too.
• Fixed the footer type on phones.
• Say where you came from and where you can go next, in both the bottom nav and the notch.
• Break that down to 3 clear moves: exit, track back, and next.
• Pulled the "Product Design Portfolio" line up against the "designing for" line it belongs with.
• Fixed the edge on the hero hands.
• The product overview cards now cycle on their own, instead of changing only when you pick one.
• Made the product overview read as a showcase of the whole project rather than a feature card for one part of it.
• Made every title promise the same thing its link delivers.
• A full page view for video, with a way to close it.
• The bike logo at the top of the Auxtail study now links out to the product.
• Moved Auxtail's outcome to the end, where it belongs.
• A flower on the notch that thanks you for visiting.
• The experience cards cycle on their own too, not only on a click.
• Tekion and Auxtail now light the right stop in the notch.
• Tekion and Auxtail now register as overview pages.
• The intro card connects inside the same page rather than sending you off it.
• Say the 3 years of experience on the résumé page.
• Put the value proposition and what I am offering into the intro, so it breaks down who I am.
• Show the career trajectory.
• Playground now sits above Visual Design.
• The work index marks the active project with a vermilion line down its left edge.
• Add the business lens to Reelic: the trend analysis, the third party and Instagram work, and how that creates value for a team and for a business.
• Indexed every project in the search modal.
• The keyboard study's episode art now lies in the keyboard's own plane instead of standing up on it.
• Built this page.
• The showreel splits into 5 named chapters you can jump between.
• Education rows open to show the core modules of each course.
• Each Dee Product app and Tekion now link out to their own sites, as Auxtail does.
• Search nests each studio's projects under it, and the Tab key flips between the board and the list.
• Reelic, Tekion Retail and Tekion Operations each got a colour of their own.
• The Dee Product overview now opens on the problem, and both it and the Tekion overview gained an outcome section.
• The résumé's tools moved to a card of their own.
• Added the Isometric Tiles study to the playground.

A playground with nothing recent in it, and 2 pieces of Apple's design worth taking apart properly.

• Rebuilt the folding iPhone as a study you can open and close, with 10 marked notes on what the real thing actually does.
• Rebuilt the iOS 27 Siri wave from Apple's own footage, read frame by frame rather than approximated.
• Gave the style guide a usage column, so every colour, size and curve says where on the site it is really used.

Reading my own site and noticing the landing page and the résumé disagreed about 2 job titles.

• Corrected 2 role titles that had drifted apart between the landing page and the résumé.
• Replaced the CV with a new one, holding the published link still so copies already handed out keep working.
• Added a page explaining the 5 beats every case study here runs, and what each word means.
• Added a page that hands the whole site to an AI agent as plain markdown.
• Made the résumé button open the document rather than download it, since the browser's own viewer already offers the download.

Wanting to know which case studies actually get read, without handing that to a third party.

• Moved analytics off a hosted plan onto an instance I run, against my own database.
• Served it from a subdomain of this site, so the request comes from the same place as the page making it.

I read the whole site on my own devices, in both orientations, and wrote down everything that was wrong.

• Fixed a tablet parking short of the showreel. The cause was the page measuring its own height 2 different ways.
• Made the showreel's timeline claim its own drag, so scrubbing it stopped reading as a swipe to the next section.
• Stopped the search modal throwing up the keyboard the instant it opens on a phone.
• Refused phone landscape with a full screen prompt rather than rendering a layout that cannot work there.
• Fixed the link preview card, which turned out to have been pointing at the wrong domain all along.
• Added a sitemap and crawler rules, and kept the 2 internal tools out of both.
• Audited the whole codebase for leaks and dead weight, then put the repository on GitHub.

Placeholder wells sitting where photographs should be, and a case study shaped differently from its neighbours.

• Wrote the Tekion retail track: 5 project showcases and 20 frames, a 13 minute read where a single paragraph used to be.
• Replaced 3 placeholder wells on the Auxtail study with the product's own photographs.
• Put Auxtail's 1 minute product film on the landing page in place of a slide from the deck.
• Gave the Reelic overview a spine of Problem, Solution, Outcome and Output, which the other studies now follow.
• Added a decisions section that shows 4 forks, what each one cost in 3 ways, and why it still won.

I measured my case study against a portfolio I admire, at the same screen width, and found the same scroll length filled the opposite way.

• Cut the case study from about 2,670 words to 702.
• Took it from 10 pictures to 25, including 6 silent loops cut from the product's own screen recording.
• Kept every section, every stop and every interaction. Only the ratio of words to pictures changed.

The design system was finished and nothing was using it yet.

• Built the work index: a list of projects that drives a single large preview beside it.
• Built My Story as a canvas you pinch and drag rather than a page you scroll.

Starting from a logo and a single hex code, with nothing else decided.

• Locked a palette of 1 accent and monochrome neutrals, in light and dark.
• Chose 3 typefaces after testing 17 candidates in a specimen page built for the job.
• Settled the icon set, the spacing rhythm, the corner motif and the motion curves as 5 layers, in order.
• Built a live style guide, so the written spec and the running code cannot quietly drift apart.
• Designed the loading animation twice. The first version is in the archive, not in the bin.