The fixed design
I’ve built probably a dozen portfolio sites by now. Every time I grew tired of them after a week or two. As a result, I ended up neglecting them and after three months, the work in my portfolio was three months behind. That wasn’t what I had in mind.
So I wrote about my design-focused blog before, and linked to an article on how to build a flexible layout. The content would be scaled according to the screen size, but with a built-in “lock”, a minimum and maximum width. This width, based on typographic units, was optimised for legibility and would scale according to the size of your type. So if you wanted the site to fill up the screen, you would just expand the window and increase the font size. It would fill up your screen and still remain legible, all without horizontal scroll bars. Since that article in 2004, I’ve built a few websites according to that logic and it has remained with me as an important part of my philosophy regarding the web.
It makes a lot of sense, I think, to build websites this way. To think about the canvas as flexible and the viewer as powerful. A website is just a poster image if it sits there in the middle of the page, surrounded by a sea of whitespace. Or worse, when it doesn’t fit in your browser window, and you end up having to scroll around to see the whole of it. While this might work, it hardly takes advantage of the fact that this machine you’re using right now is a very powerful computer. It can recalculate a layout thousands of times per second, it can calculate for you whether the image will fit or not and do something accordingly. It can do anything! Even iPhones, tiny computers in your pocket, are phenomenal at doing these things. It would be a waste not to use it, especially if it can improve your message. So I started thinking.
The iPhone makes rescaling invisible and ubiquitous. Most users probably don’t even notice that their window changes size and aspect ratio.
The design sticks to the window
The content and interface are entirely based on the size of the browser window. That’s the premise of this website. It will always fit. It will always be a useful portfolio, whether you’re on an iPad, a small laptop, a mobile phone or on a 30″ display at work. The work will always fit and the content is always available. This is a luxury. I consider it an enormous luxury, because I can finally stop worrying whether my design will fit to the computer my possible client might be using.
Aesthetically, things are toned down deliberately. A flashy design would detract from my work and would not show what I believe work should be, i.e. empowering content, not obfuscating it. The typography is particularly “classic”. I use a few classics in the same font stack, a bit of a travesty but nobody will see the difference. The nameplate is set in Roger Excoffon’s Antique Olive, a display favourite of mine (you can see it in use on this sandwich board and on my photo blog), and I intend to rotate, in the near future, some of my own typefaces there.
So is this the Portfolio to End All Portfolios? Probably not. I’ll iterate and refine as time goes by, and it might change drastically at some point, but right now, it can expand and it can work. It’s a new thing, and I like it.