In my second year of university, I took a design unit where we learnt about more advanced theories in design as well as learnt how to use various tools such as Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD. For our assessment, we had to design a TV Application similar to Netflix, but using open source movies. There had to be an app for use on TVs and a companion app for use on mobiles. I decided to code my prototypes.
In my second year of university, I took a User Experience unit. In this unit, we learnt about the key theories behind user experience and then had to implement these theories by mocking up a job app similar in function to Indeed.
This band posted an advert on Facebook for a Web Developer. I approached them and they needed help making their site mobile friendly. They had a friend build them the site using some sort of framework, the code was a mess, resulting in the site being slow and not mobile-friendly. I cleaned the site up, updated some content as their new album had just been released, and gave them the finished copy of the site.
You may have read Re-creating my portfolio with React where I talked about my experiences converting my simple static portfolio into a React website, turning reusable objects on the page into React components. This inspired me to learn Gatsby, a static site generator that uses React.
I was previously using my a category on my photography WordPress blog to host my blogs about web design and projects. This was a bit of a weird experience for users as if they chose to read more about a post on my portfolio, they’d be directed to my photography site. Gatsby allows me to pull in all the posts from WordPress and create a new site. This also allowed me to store all of my portfolio items as WordPress posts. I installed the Advanced Custom Fields plugin to handle the tech icons and button links.
The site is now insanely fast hosted on Netlify and using Server Side Rendering. Gatsby’s links also make navigating from page to page incredibly quick.
Whenever I want to add content to the site I just login to WordPress, create a new post under the relevant category, with a tag for if I want it to be displayed on the homepage of my portfolio. I hit publish and a new Netlify build is queued then deployed using the Jamstack deployments plugin.
I want to build every website this way in the future. It took me about 2 days to set up, so it’s incredibly quick to develop. Plus, sites are faster and more secure on the Jamstack.
I wanted to practise my design skills using Adobe XD so I made a mockup of a mobile app that combines current web-based applications that the university offers.
My second project at University was to redesign the Project Gutenberg site. As part of this project, I learnt how to use Figma.
As part of my media course at Sixth Form we had to create multiple websites. This website is a social media platform for photographers to share their work.
