Ian Holden – Online Portfolio

This is the fourth iteration of my online portfolio website. It serves as a home for my blog posts and online projects.
  • Gatsby
  • Markdown
  • React
  • #ffffff
  • #f2f2f2
  • #a6a6a6

Design Decisions

I chose a monochromatic colour palette for this project. In my previous portfolio website designs, I have struggled to define a colour palette that can represent my ‘brand’. This project was no different. Because of this, I decided to use this struggle as a feature in this portfolio site’s design.

What is this portfolio trying to do? The primary objective is to show off my work! With this in mind, I realised that colour could be introduced by the project content. I use shades of grey for the portfolio’s primary and secondary colours and the project content adds the colour. For interactive content such as buttons and links, I have used colour to highlight these areas.

Ian Holden website home page
The site’s monochromatic colour scheme allows the coloured interactive sections to stand out to the user.

Content

I wanted to pay close attention to the the blog and project sections on this project. It was important that the content is legible and offered as few distractions as possible.

Pulling elements from my previous portfolio designs, music will always be a feature on my site. I have reintroduced song lyrics in the footer. Lyrics are a perfect way to show my love for music and also highlight the values that I hold in my work.

Tech Stack

This project became a playground for my development in building statically generated websites with Gatsby. Gatsby offers great website performance and user experience out of the box.

I had previously built my website with a headless instance of WordPress to manage my content but I have since found this to cause unnecessary maintenance.

Gatsby also allows you to use a markdown files (MDX) to drive the data behind your site. This allows me to create the content for my site using a familiar syntax and also helps me to syndicate my content with other blogging platforms that also accept Markdown.