From Template
to Code

Twenty Years in the Making

I still remember my first real website portfolio. It was 2003, and I had just moved out to San Francisco—the mecca of design, or at least that is what I called it. It was the end of the dot-com era. I was right out of college with a degree in communication design, the one major the crash had decided to take personally.

My focus was multimedia. I knew how to code. I just hated it. I have always been design-first. If it were not for my buddy Sean, who ended up making it for me, I would not be here. And yes, I thank him all the time. 🙂

The site was called Creatures in the Night dot com. It had an owl for my logo. It was a time when the internet was creative. It was exciting. It was new. I will never forget being asked in an interview if I felt like what I do as a designer was profound. I had never felt that was the case until right now.

One Prompt to Build It

I cannot describe the feeling that overwhelmed me when I asked Claude to help me move my portfolio off Squarespace, a place it had been since Squarespace’s conception. With no other details, it asked for the URL and went to work.

While it was working, these were the thoughts that ran through my head:

• What if this works?
• You mean I could have done this months ago, and all I had to do was ask?
• Then I thought about how much money that was: at $25 a month, compared with the cost of $17 for one month’s subscription to Claude. And I did not even want to pay that. lol
• I remember when template sites like Squarespace emerged, and people talked about them and asked how I felt about them replacing my job. At the time I worked for an enterprise company, so the honest answer was no — that stuff was built for small businesses and solo creators, not for what I did. I cannot help but feel the same way now and this is only the beginning.

An Honest Reckoning

The output came back. I was not impressed. The images were broken, the spacing was off, and the width of the page was 1080. But it was live and no longer on Squarespace.

The designer in me immediately began to create a persona to validate whether someone with no prior coding knowledge could do this. I did not dumb anything down, per se, but I carefully monitored my actions.

My pain points of using Squarespace solely for a portfolio:

• Not mobile-first
• Cost ($25 a month for another subscription)
• Inconsistency of fonts and colors; no automation as a feature
• Zero flexibility in terms of design

I had a vision for how I wanted to display my work years ago, and it came back with that design. Still very relevant. Once I realized this, I got to work.

The one point that was difficult at times, was context switching. For me that was moving away from Figma to comp or mock anything. So, I pushed myself further, no notebook, no analog. Just a lot of screenshots, until I ran out of images one can upload in a chat, multiple times, and that is when Claude recommended Claude Code. Or as I like to call her, CC.

What's Next

Anyone can say they used AI to build an app but without the critical thinking of a seasoned product designer, the question will be how you differentiate yours from all the others.