Designing My Own
Stage

Twenty Years in the Making

For two decades, I told myself the same story: someday I'd build a portfolio that was truly mine — not a template, not a theme, not a builder I had to fight with. Every few years I'd open a new tool, get a few sections in, and stop. Between client work, deadlines, and the simple reality that hand-coding a site from scratch was a project unto itself, "someday" kept getting pushed out.

The site you're looking at right now is that someday. It didn't take twenty years, or twenty weeks, or even twenty days. It started with a single prompt.

One Prompt to Build It

I described what I wanted: a quiet, editorial space that felt like Cormorant Garamond and Inter had a conversation — minimal, confident, with room for the work to breathe. From there, I worked alongside Claude to structure the layout, write the copy, build the case studies, and tune every detail down to the dark mode toggle and the way the mobile browser chrome changes color when you switch themes.

What used to be the hardest part of building a portfolio — the blank canvas, the setup, the boilerplate — disappeared almost entirely. What was left was the part I actually care about: the design decisions, the words, the story each project tells.

An Honest Reckoning

I won't pretend this didn't change something fundamental about how I think about my craft. For years, the gap between "I want this" and "this exists" was measured in weeks of implementation. Now it's measured in a conversation. That's not a small shift — it's a different relationship with making.

But the work didn't get easier in the way I expected. Taste, judgment, and the ability to know what's actually good still sit entirely with me. If anything, AI raised the bar on those skills, because the bottleneck moved from can I build it to do I know what's worth building. That's the reckoning — not that designers become unnecessary, but that the parts of the job that were always the real job become the whole job.

What's Next

This site will keep evolving the same way it started — iteratively, in conversation, one prompt at a time. New case studies, new experiments, new ways of telling the story of the work. Twenty years of wanting a stage of my own, and now I get to keep building it.