The Problem
The previous version of the site fell short in a specific way. It presented work without presenting a person. The design was competent but generic — the kind of portfolio that could belong to anyone with a similar skillset. There was no sense of voice, no personality, no indication of how I think or what I care about. For an audience that includes design recruiters, engineering hiring managers, startup founders, and potential clients, that vagueness is a problem. Each of those audiences is making a different kind of judgment, and all of them need to understand who they are dealing with before they care about what I have built.
The site also had structural problems. Everything lived on a single page, which flattened the hierarchy between different kinds of work and made it impossible to give individual projects the depth they deserved. There was no proper introduction. The hero section held a photo and a title, which is the minimum, not a statement.
The Process
The redesign started with a clear point of view on what the site should feel like, not what it should look like. The reference point was editorial design: typography-led, considered in its pacing, closer to a well-designed magazine or art catalogue than to the glossy, animation-heavy portfolios that dominate the current design landscape. High-intensity motion, bold colour gradients, glass textures — these are the defaults everyone reaches for. The decision to move in the opposite direction was deliberate and personal. I am drawn to typography, to retro and old-school design sensibilities, to restraint as an aesthetic choice rather than a limitation.
The design knowledge I brought to this was not only from product design. Photography is a long-standing practice, and the compositional principles from that discipline shaped how I approached every layout decision. Rule of thirds, golden ratio, different kinds of framing — these are not abstract concepts in photography, they are trained instincts about where the eye goes and why. Applying them to a design system meant thinking about reading patterns, visual weight, and negative space with the same rigour a photographer brings to a frame.
The typographic system was built around human readability taken seriously. Cormorant Garamond at display scale, Helvetica and Times New Roman for structural elements, Inter for body copy. The system was built on Fibonacci proportions, with every decision — font sizes, paragraph spacing, letter spacing, line lengths, sentence widths — traced back to what is most comfortable for a human eye to read over time. The goal was a system that feels effortless to read precisely because so much effort went into calibrating it.
The hardest single decision was how to structure the work. A single-page layout had the appeal of simplicity but the cost of depth. Individual projects could not breathe. The case studies, which are the most important thing on the site, had no room to be what they needed to be. Moving to a multi-page architecture gave each project its own space, and gave the homepage the room to be an introduction rather than an index.
The hero section became the clearest expression of the brief. Rather than a photo and a title, the opening of the site is a statement about who I am and how I think. The personality that was missing from the previous version had to start there, in the first thing anyone reads.
The backend is built on Supabase with a deliberately simple two-table schema: projects and case studies. The simplicity was a decision, not a default. A more complex schema would have created maintenance overhead for a site that needs to be easy to update and evolve. The architecture is built to be repainted.
The Solution
The site is live at rashodkorala.com. It is structured across dedicated pages rather than a single scroll, with the homepage functioning as an editorial introduction and individual case study pages given the space to tell full project stories. The design system is typography-led throughout, with Fibonacci-based spacing and a warm off-white palette that keeps the focus on the content.
The Supabase backend allows the site to be updated without touching code. New projects, new case studies, new writing — all managed through the database. The system was built to grow with the work rather than resist it.
The Outcome
The site launched recently and is fully live. Feedback is still being collected. What exists now is the foundation: a design system that holds together, a structure that can accommodate the work as it expands, and a voice that is recognisably mine. The redesign took one week of focused work, which was only possible because the point of view was clear before a single screen was designed.
What I Learned
Having a strong opinion about what something should feel like before touching the tools makes everything faster. The week this took would have been a month without clarity on the editorial direction, the typographic system, and the structural decision to move away from a single page. The photography background mattered here more than I expected — compositional thinking is compositional thinking, whether the frame is a photograph or a webpage. The skills transfer directly, and recognising that connection changed how I approach design problems.