A short history of my web portfolios

Recently at work I sat on a panel for graduates where we discussed our approach to creating a portfolio.

Whilst talking about my own experiences, it made me reflect on my own history and how I've used portfolios over the years.

It also made me jump start the process to create a new portfolio for myself – to better reflect my career progression and current design process.

Everything I built after that first site lives on GitHub, which is a clearer record than my memory of it.

2018: Leaving Shillington

My first design portfolio was created in a week whilst finishing up at Shillington College. It sat on a hosted template, probably Adobe, and it predates the GitHub repos. In hindsight a lot of the designs showed promise but lacked execution. The page is simple and gets to the point quickly, and there is little else to see.

2020: HTML, CSS and GitHub Pages

In May 2020 I published danielshires.github.io. The README calls it danielshires.com v1.0, the first version of the portfolio, built with HTML, CSS and a little JavaScript, and hosted on GitHub Pages.

The site title was Digital & Print Design. The about page introduced a graphic designer working across print and digital. Projects were split into design and personal work: Maso Fitness, Scenic, Gallagher, Made, Wimbledon, the Wallace Collection, and a personal piece called Luna Land.

2020: Jekyll and Forestry

In August 2020 I started Daniel-Shires-Portfolio-v2. This version is Jekyll, with Forestry set up as the CMS. The title changed to Graphic Designer and Front-End Web Developer, and the homepage opened with “Digital. Print. Code. I've got you covered.”

Most of the project pages were still marked coming soon. The homepage pointed people to a PDF in the repo, D-Shires-Digital-Portfolio.pdf, while the new pages were in progress. The work listed there was Maso Fitness, Gallagher, Wimbledon, Scenic Group, Made, and Design Maxims. The services section already included landing pages, multi-page websites, and a headless CMS with Jekyll.

2021: Hugo and Netlify

In September 2021 I started danielshires-portfolio-2021. The README describes it as the third version, and also as danielshires.com v2.0. It is a Hugo site, processed with Gulp, and deployed with Netlify. The last content update in that repo is from October 2023.

The hero had moved on again: UX/UI Designer and Front-End Developer, with the line “Design + Code. I've got you covered.” The about page traces the start back to 2018, leaving a content manager role at ASOS for graphic design, and credits the Sydney Global Goals Jam in 2019 with the turn toward human-centred design.

Featured design work included a MyCareSpace case study, Maso Fitness, Made, and Scenic Group. A code section sat next to it: Design Maxims, and Yo Gif, a small search page built on the Giphy API. The code page says those projects were HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript, processed with Gulp and Webpack.

2024: Astro and Sanity

In April 2024 I opened two repos within a few days. portfolio-cms is a Strapi project, described as the CMS for the portfolio and blog. photography-portfolio-2024 is an Astro starter I used to learn posts, collections and a blog. Each one has about a day of commits.

On 28 April 2024 I created portfolio-2024, which is this website. It is built with Astro, React and Tailwind, and Sanity holds the photography, writing and design projects. It is the repository I am still pushing to.