Here's what a portfolio website should look like

One of the best speakers at Generate New York 2015 last month is a designer at Sparkbox and net's Young Designer of the Year 2014, Katie Kovalcin. What makes her portfolio site so special are the little geometric patterns scattered around. The patterns glitch, they rotate, they animate their stroked lines … they are the detail that the whole site hangs upon, and they work exceptionally well. (Create an equally great site by using one of the best web hosting services and the best website builders around.)

"I was inspired by the bold, geometric textile patterns that Dusen Dusen creates," Katie says. "The exciting energy of their patterns and shapes is something that I wanted to capture for the web." Such is the energy of those shapes that when visiting the site on mobile, where the SVGs aren't present, the experience feels a little diminished. 

The site was built by Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks, using the increasingly popular static pages generator Jekyll. It's hosted on GitHub Pages, and has a custom Grunt set-up for creating web-ready SVGs from Illustrator exports, making it easy to update (be sure to save those files in cloud storage).

What I really appreciate about this site is the sense of personality, and the feeling that it's been designed by someone with a very clear vision of the end product.

Words: Peter Gasston

Peter Gasston is a veteran web developer who now works as a technologist and frontend lead at rehabstudio. He’s the author of The Book of CSS3 and The Modern Web.

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