New year, new look for this site

Welcome to the new elliotbentley.com! This 2019 redesign combines my portfolio site (elliotbentley.com) and blog (ejb.github.io) into a one-stop shop for all of your Elliot needs. I tried not to overthink the design, taking inspiration from the clean look of mobile news apps.

Screenshot of homepage

Speaking of apps, my updated portfolio is inspired by the way the iOS app store treats screenshots. I wanted to give the reader a good sense of each featured piece, which on mobile rarely fit on one screen, using autoplaying video and a series of screenshots. For a native-like feel, I used CSS scroll snapping.

Screenshot of portfolio page

The header animation on the homepage is a bit silly, but I do love playing around with the limitless potential of graphics with HTML5 Canvas. I couldn’t think of a photo that would fill the spot, and a gradient or felt too vibrant. If interested, you can read the source code.

Under the hood: I considered moving the entire site’s architecture to a trendy isomorphic JavaScript app. But Jekyll still works great as a blogging platform and can render JSON data files in its templates. The pages are so light (most clocking at under 100kb) that client-side routing feels unnecessary. Best of all, it’s all hosted on GitHub Pages for free. Which means the source code is on GitHub too!

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