(9) A History of My Websites
An evolution of personal portfolios over the years and brutalism as resistance
I never had formal training in design, but I’ve always been designing. Like many designers, I have had my fair share of building and rebuilding portfolios over the years. Initially, my idea of websites naturally settled into a need for self-branding as this seemed to be the default gateway for web design. I thought a “good website” meant striving for eye-catching, bold interactions with vibrant colors and inner pages inundated by detailed case studies. I thought a “good website” would land me design jobs — which in some cases, turned out to be true (more on this later). I quickly realized that a “digital portfolio as a website” served a specific audience and practice I was not interested in. Its layout seemed to honor productivity: a layout for capitalism, homogeneity, the artist reduced to a modern worker.
Updating my portfolios felt like a chore. The urge, the need, to improve my websites never ended. I was always stuck in a circular loop of designing for the sake of better interaction, better animation, better copywriting, and to be a better candidate, but my websites never satiated me. I deeply yearned to craft an online space for myself to capture the essence of my thinking and working. My archive of websites is a history of my self-learning journey, but also reminds me that my relationship to net art and web design had been parochial and flattened by big website builders: I had been building websites for others this whole time.
“Most personal websites aim at personal connection with other people, or at establishing oneself professionally. They're not usually about helping the author think and create, except incidentally.
Those things – personal connection, professional marketing – are important. But as the purpose for a website I can't get excited about them. But I can get excited about the idea of using this website to enhance my ability to think and create.”
— Michael Nielsen on his online notebook
Before I learned the frameworks of frontend, before I took my first art class in college, before I even fathomed a career in design, when I was knee-deep in a pre-med track as a neuroscience major, I made my first website.
An intro to websites / Adobe Portfolio
My first website was built on Adobe Portfolio because it was included in my student Adobe package (I miss being a student and all the free things that came with it…) and I thought it had a low barrier to learning compared to other website builders. I picked an empty template to make the background green, with texts “Work”, “Play” “About” and “Contact”, in big bold purple fonts (a classic green x purple combo that I still embody to this day). I am unsure what work I even included here. Perhaps some projects, illustrations, and photographs. I remember feeling compelled to include “play” because “work” felt like a professional delineation that did not share the full extent of my craft and thinking — perhaps an initial inception to my portfolio dissatisfaction that had been brewing from the start (Unfortunately, no screenshots or images of my site could be found).
A practical portfolio / Cargo
Moving away from Adobe Portfolio, I wanted to dedicate some time to building a more “practical portfolio”… optimized for hiring, something more legitimate, if you will, whatever that means. I stayed on Cargo to build a few different websites over the years. I added custom codes for the first time. I built out full case studies. Cargo was cute, and it landed me multiple design internships including Wix and a political design fellowship that eventually turned into my first full-time design gig. It was organized and playful, but the interface was not very user-friendly and at times, I felt a plateau in its customization. I started yearning for a more sustainable non-templatized website and imagined what it could be.
The lord of websites / Wix
Summer of 2021, out of college, I had my first design internship at the Wix Playground Academy. It was a one-month intensive summer program (completely free!) and I turned down the first offer of a political design fellowship to attend the program. I was only really compelled to accept Wix for its big industry name and at the time, I foolishly thought that this internship would have a better chance of leading to a full-time job (oh boy was I wrong!). At the height of COVID, I attended the 4-week remote program in my childhood bedroom, online every day at 6 am to attend lectures, workshops, and demos.
We were expected to leave the program with personalized “high-level portfolios” hosted on EditorX by Wix — a wording specifically provided by the mentors to add to our resume. The program was fast-paced with regular critiques and I was in a constant creative rut trying to meet deadlines and show something that would help me stand out. At the end of the program, my portfolio received a lot of marketing traction, and my final portfolio was plastered as the star child of fervent marketing for the program. I collaborated on a few pieces for their socials, interviewed, and was featured in a few design articles. I started receiving emails on freelance and collaborations (that I completely missed because they went to spam). I was suddenly receiving an overwhelming amount of spotlight from good marketing and one well-designed website.
I share this not as a highlight of my design career, but as a sobering moment. Surely, the program presented a good learning opportunity to meet with high-profile artists and designers as mentors that I otherwise would have never met. However, the program seemed to hold more emphasis on producing high-level portfolios built and hosted on Wix than the actual process itself. It was a compact marathon pushing for production and completion. I was designing for 8-10 hours every day for four weeks, turning dead wheels and receiving dividing critiques from different mentors. By week four, I was completely exhausted and it was evident that my peers were also struggling to meet the deadlines.
There was also a very notable lack of diversity in the cohort. The demographic of my class (although I am unsure how it has changed over the years) had been mostly East Asian women in art school. Out of 30 students, there was only one Black student, about 3-4 male-identifying students, and less than 5 students representing Latinx, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, and mixed heritage. Furthermore, as one of the few students without a formal design background, I felt immense imposter syndrome and knowledge gap seeing that the majority of my peers already had “high-level”, polished portfolios used to apply for the program. I was lucky that my website on Cargo was sufficient enough, but I found it ironic that to be accepted into a web design program, one needed to come in with an already polished portfolio. The only difference? Now it’s hosted on Wix.
I am not trying to dismiss the labor, effort, community, resources, and intention of free mentorship programs. Growing up low-income, I have benefitted immensely from incredible mentors who made personal sacrifices and labor to make free programs possible. I believe in the power of paying things forward and have a big penchant for (true) accessibility and open-sourced knowledge sharing. I know that some folks would be grateful to be accepted into this program and I, too, felt a desperate desire at one point when job searching. But this opportunity had rather left me with an ick. Perhaps this is because institutionally, I saw the hidden politics of the organization and the problems underneath. From buried HR complaints of sexual harassment of one of the mentors to the lack of diversity in guest artists and lecturers, it was hard to come out of the program feeling proud of my work.
I also say this experience was sobering because I wondered if this is what it takes to “make it” in the traditional world of design: corporate marketing, compressed designs, templatized solutions without listening to what I wanted to see on my websites. I added plastic bags and wraps as the theme of my website because I received feedback that there wasn’t any “legitimate story that brings everything together” in my first few drafts. For some reason, adding repeated elements was groundbreaking enough to receive legitimacy for marketing which I still find silly to this day. If this was the acme of corporate design or a glimpse of what it could be, I knew I did not want it. On the fifth email for a marketing interview from Wix, I turned it down, telling them I was exhausted. My portfolio still highlights the main landing page of the program.
A Defeatist mindset / Readymag
Post Wix, I vowed to never use website builders again. I had started coding to build something from scratch, but its progress was slow and I was desperate for a new job. During this time, I resorted to an interactive PDF portfolio, inspired by Laurel Schwulst, to mimic a website for job applications. Designers like Laurel Schwulst allow me to zoom in on the process and narrative, the feeling of making, more so than the outcome or the tool itself. She describes her website as “ a shifting house next to a river of knowledge”. I am still exploring what mine could be.
This time reinforced the practice that a portfolio does not necessarily have to be a website, nor does one’s personal website need to showcase a portfolio. A portfolio does not necessarily capture one’s essence, and it’s just a matter of finding the right mediums, tools, material, and intention. My idea of a “good designer” has also changed drastically over the years. I don’t find a good designer to necessarily have a website. Good design is anything that I find compelling and makes me think. It’s the kind of work that makes me imagine how this process could be applied to my work. It’s something that helps me rediscover my wonder that is often overshadowed by the motion of work and being.
Unfortunately, this practice was short-lived because most job applications required links to live websites for portfolios. So I made one in 3 days. I went to Readymag, took their most basic template, and tweaked it slightly to upload my content. At this point, I felt defeated by web builders. I surrendered completely to its efficiency knowing that this wasn’t going to be an intentional reflection or an exploration of who I am as a person and an artist. I knew I had to find a job and this was the easiest way to do it and I did. This website lived for 3 months.
I shit on website builders, but I want to acknowledge that it is a very powerful tool that has lowered the barrier for web design. I do not want to dismiss how some creatives have found ways to encapsulate their unique artistic voice on website builders through high-level customization. And that’s okay! Using a template from Readymag helped reduce my timeline for my job search. My concern is that the notion of net art and the internet is often branded by the narratives corporations make them out to be, and it feels that the entry to this craft must rely on subscriptions or templates to fulfill guidelines set by an audience that is not the creator.
Brutalism as resistance / Handmade
After landing my new job, I knew it was time to stop relying on big corporate web makers that flatten design and make something of my own, no matter how long it takes. I wanted to make something lightweight and sustainable (for me and the environment) but also bare-boned. I have always gravitated towards brutalism as an act of resistance against the evolution of tools towards immense convenience and against conformity towards lavish builds, whether they be websites or buildings. Brutalism highlights the fundamentals and what is at the core: it urges a stripping of embellishments to reveal what’s underneath.
The Wikipedia page Brutalist Architecture shares,
Peter Smithson believed that the core of brutalism was a reverence for materials, expressed honestly, stating “Brutalism is not concerned with the material as such but rather the quality of material”, and "the seeing of materials for what they were: the woodness of the wood; the sandiness of sand.”
[Brutalism is] an ethic, not an aesthetic.
Similarly, I think I am working to capture the “websiteness of the website”, or “Eileeness of Eileen”, whatever that means…
My website is currently in progress. I am not too sure what projects I want to share here. Maybe websites are meant to be always in progress. But this website feels most like me. It honors an exploration of self and practices that build value through freeing and autonomous frameworks. Its architecture and subsistence are not tied to a corporation or a monthly subscription (other than my domain), just me. It may not convey all the UX case studies I have done or the marketing impacts I have made. It barely shares any professional background in my design career. But it builds on top of the people, reading, and writing that informs my practice and embodies the raw encapsulation of who I am and yearn to be as a person and an artist.
Thanks for walking through my digital sites with me.
— Eileen