Design
Website Reboot
Website Reboot
November 25, 2025
·
3m
read time
Welcome!
Hey there! Welcome to my little home on the world wide web.
My name is Chris (as you might have already gathered). I’m a huge outdoor nerd who’s passionate about learning and a bit of a jack-of-all-trades.
Professionally, I’m a product (software) designer and I also dabble in web and app development. I think they're calling it ‘Design Engineer’ these days.
I currently work at Atlassian on the Trello team. May 2026 will be 8 years.
If you're interested in learning more about me, there’s an entire page about me and one dedicated to what I’m up to right now if you’re interested.
Rebooting my website
It's been a few years—maybe 6 or so—since I've done a proper personal site and portfolio. During those in-between years my site has served as more of a landing page to tell people who I am, what I do, where I work, and how to get in touch with me. It was effective and dead-simple to manage.
The reason why that site was a simple landing page was because I’ve always been a bit of a perfectionist (understatement) and hold myself to a sometimes impossibly high standard. There was never a shortage of redesign concepts or lack of plans to launch a more comprehensive, in-depth portfolio. In fact, as I write this, I’ve got Figma open in the background with a file titled ‘Portfolio Redesign’ with 15 or so pages littered with completely different concepts and directions. And as any designer is familiar with, I woke up the following morning after each redesign, hated all of them, and questioned my very existence as a designer. It’s a curse but that's just how it is.
My original goal for this site was to primarily be a home for my design work, which is actually quite a boring goal to me personally. I’m proud of the work that I’ve done over my career, but making it the singular purpose of the just site doesn't motivate me or capture the entirety of who I am, my interests, or capture my point of view on anything. So, I’ve changed my whole perspective on what I want this site to be and evolve into.
The version of the site that you’re experiencing right now is a point of pride for me. I’m very happy with how it’s turned out and the plans I have for it, which is a rare feeling for me when it comes to personal projects.
My philosophy on this site is simple and so are my goals for it. First, it’s not just a portfolio—it’s my personal space on the internet. It should be a place where everything I share doesn't have to be perfect or comprehensive. It should be a place where I can be myself and allow my personality to shine through. It’s not for recruiters, it’s for me.
My goals
Share my thoughts, ideas, learnings, and advice on a range of topics that I feel uniquely positioned to talk about.
Explore and push the limits of my skills in design, development, photography, and recreational sports.
Showcase projects that I feel are remarkable or particularly fun, interesting and worthy of sharing.
...and probably other stuff that I haven’t even thought of yet. I’m willing to just go with the flow and try things out and see how things organically evolve.
I’ll have a separate post next week going into more detail on all of these goals.
At the time of this writing (November 2025), some areas of the site may very much be a work in progress and I expect many aspects of the design will need to undergo changes to accommodate new features, new types of content, etc... So if you see something that looks odd or ‘broken’ —this is your warning.
The site is designed in Figma and built in Framer at the moment. This decision was solely based on how easy and quick it was to get something online with the limited time I have. Losing momentum on a project because you’re stuck is detrimental, especially at the outset of projects. Typically—for me at least—means completely losing motivation and failing to make any progress at all.
I will eventually migrate to a fully custom, hand-made site again, if for no other reason than to add Loui’s incredibly fun badge to it. I joke...kinda. Knowing what’s ’under the hood’ and having full control and ownership is something I miss and that I believe is immensely important and valuable. I’m not sure when that transition will occur but my tentative plans are to start sometime in 2026 and finish by the end of the year.
And finally, you will never see AI-anything on my site. I do not use AI to write or edit these posts or create anything else on this site. I don’t use it to research, generate any ideas or images, or get it to help me do anything. It’s not what it’s best suited for and I strongly believe that people should use their actual human intelligence & brain for creative work instead of outsourcing their thinking to a soulless plagiarism machine.
Thanks for stopping by.
—Chris
Welcome!
Hey there! Welcome to my little home on the world wide web.
My name is Chris (as you might have already gathered). I’m a huge outdoor nerd who’s passionate about learning and a bit of a jack-of-all-trades.
Professionally, I’m a product (software) designer and I also dabble in web and app development. I think they're calling it ‘Design Engineer’ these days.
I currently work at Atlassian on the Trello team. May 2026 will be 8 years.
If you're interested in learning more about me, there’s an entire page about me and one dedicated to what I’m up to right now if you’re interested.
Rebooting my website
It's been a few years—maybe 6 or so—since I've done a proper personal site and portfolio. During those in-between years my site has served as more of a landing page to tell people who I am, what I do, where I work, and how to get in touch with me. It was effective and dead-simple to manage.
The reason why that site was a simple landing page was because I’ve always been a bit of a perfectionist (understatement) and hold myself to a sometimes impossibly high standard. There was never a shortage of redesign concepts or lack of plans to launch a more comprehensive, in-depth portfolio. In fact, as I write this, I’ve got Figma open in the background with a file titled ‘Portfolio Redesign’ with 15 or so pages littered with completely different concepts and directions. And as any designer is familiar with, I woke up the following morning after each redesign, hated all of them, and questioned my very existence as a designer. It’s a curse but that's just how it is.
My original goal for this site was to primarily be a home for my design work, which is actually quite a boring goal to me personally. I’m proud of the work that I’ve done over my career, but making it the singular purpose of the just site doesn't motivate me or capture the entirety of who I am, my interests, or capture my point of view on anything. So, I’ve changed my whole perspective on what I want this site to be and evolve into.
The version of the site that you’re experiencing right now is a point of pride for me. I’m very happy with how it’s turned out and the plans I have for it, which is a rare feeling for me when it comes to personal projects.
My philosophy on this site is simple and so are my goals for it. First, it’s not just a portfolio—it’s my personal space on the internet. It should be a place where everything I share doesn't have to be perfect or comprehensive. It should be a place where I can be myself and allow my personality to shine through. It’s not for recruiters, it’s for me.
My goals
Share my thoughts, ideas, learnings, and advice on a range of topics that I feel uniquely positioned to talk about.
Explore and push the limits of my skills in design, development, photography, and recreational sports.
Showcase projects that I feel are remarkable or particularly fun, interesting and worthy of sharing.
...and probably other stuff that I haven’t even thought of yet. I’m willing to just go with the flow and try things out and see how things organically evolve.
I’ll have a separate post next week going into more detail on all of these goals.
At the time of this writing (November 2025), some areas of the site may very much be a work in progress and I expect many aspects of the design will need to undergo changes to accommodate new features, new types of content, etc... So if you see something that looks odd or ‘broken’ —this is your warning.
The site is designed in Figma and built in Framer at the moment. This decision was solely based on how easy and quick it was to get something online with the limited time I have. Losing momentum on a project because you’re stuck is detrimental, especially at the outset of projects. Typically—for me at least—means completely losing motivation and failing to make any progress at all.
I will eventually migrate to a fully custom, hand-made site again, if for no other reason than to add Loui’s incredibly fun badge to it. I joke...kinda. Knowing what’s ’under the hood’ and having full control and ownership is something I miss and that I believe is immensely important and valuable. I’m not sure when that transition will occur but my tentative plans are to start sometime in 2026 and finish by the end of the year.
And finally, you will never see AI-anything on my site. I do not use AI to write or edit these posts or create anything else on this site. I don’t use it to research, generate any ideas or images, or get it to help me do anything. It’s not what it’s best suited for and I strongly believe that people should use their actual human intelligence & brain for creative work instead of outsourcing their thinking to a soulless plagiarism machine.
Thanks for stopping by.
—Chris