Project 01
thegarvanator Website Redesign
A full rebuild of my personal site into a cleaner, darker, weirder, more playful portfolio for projects, photography, notes, and experiments.
Preview
Visual direction
A stylized mockup of the layout system, dark interface, glowing cards, and playful design language used across the redesign.
Overview
Why this exists
The goal of this redesign is to turn thegarvanator into a proper digital home base: part portfolio, part archive, part creative playground. The site needs to feel personal, polished, and fun without becoming too serious or corporate.
This project is also a way to document the process of building the site itself. The design choices, the server setup, the CSS experiments, and all the tiny fixes that make the final thing feel good.
Goal
Make it feel alive
The site should have personality: glowing panels, dark spacey backgrounds, animated details, project cards, photography sections, and enough visual weirdness to feel like mine.
Build notes
What I’m working on
- Reusable page layouts
- Project landing and detail pages
- Photography album structure
- Responsive mobile cleanup
- Cleaner CSS organization over time
Lessons
What I’m learning
The big lesson so far: consistency matters. Reusing the same header, footer, spacing system, and page shell keeps each new page from turning into a one-off mess.
Next steps
Where this goes next
After this detail page is solid, the next move is cloning the structure for Project 2, then replacing the placeholder project content with real write-ups, screenshots, and experiments.
Next project
Automation Playground
A future home for scripts, workflow experiments, cleanup tools, and practical tech tinkering.