My portfolio website, dubbed “Hale’s Folio,” has been launched into the real world like a young frog taking its first step on land. (Please excuse the horrible simile.) I thought I’d take a moment and explain the process behind how I came up with this portfolio layout.

All layouts spring from some sort of inspiration. For this one, I came across Douglas Bowman’s stopdesign. The design used several color schemes of the same layout for different pages. His brown rendition was particularly interesting because brown is not a common primary color, and yet it worked very well.

Douglas Bowman’s stopdesign

As I was playing around with my own take of a brown layout, I recalled having taken a picture of a gourmet French dark chocolate bar. The chocolate wrapper provides many of the colors as well as the logo design employed in this layout.

French chocolate bar used as design inspiration

The following is the final design as it appeared before its conversion as a WordPress theme:

Final layout design

Reflecting upon the design, my primary criticism is that it isn’t as sharp/bright as it should be. This layout may evolve in the precedent to address this and other small issues I have yet to iron out.

Tags: design