CRANKIN

My friend, world-class graphic designer, Marc English needed a new portfolio that focused on more recent projects and updated case studies and images. Marc designed the site taking the approach that site templates should have a minimal design that would let the portfolio work speak for itself. To reflect the area’s of Marc’s best-known work and expertise, the design of the site incorporated many elements — colors, fonts, columns — from print design. Marc handed off the site and page designs and I then converted the mockups into HTML and CSS.

I normally try to use a static site generator for a site of this size and expected use. For many years I used Jekyll, but more recently I’ve switched to using Eleventy. I never had problems with Jekyll but it’s written in Ruby where Eleventy is written in Node and I’m more familiar with Node than I am with Ruby. Eleventy also requires less up-front configuration for how I normally use it and provides for many more templating options than Jekyll does. The site is hosted on Netlify because its integration with Github makes code updates quick and easy and we’ll have the option to add Netlify CMS if Marc decides he needs to make more frequent updates to the site in the future.

The site is obviously image heavy and Marc and I have plans to add both lazy loading and more responsive image options in order to increase the site’s performance over all browsers and devices.