Projects!

So, I made a new personal website

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Yep, I did it again! The perpetual stew of side projects: my personal website. I think I was partly inspired and hooked by my Instagram feed pushing a lot of design content in my face.

What is the inspiration?!

To be 100% honest, I'm not really sure. I think it's a combination of Dinamo Typefaces dropping the Areal font, and my previous iteration of this website being kinda vibed and not treated with the love it deserves. Therefore, I wanted to give this website an artisanally coded new lick of paint, and update the content while I was at it.

I think another reason for the revamp is me just being really impressed by people who have blogs and project pages and stuff, imagine sitting down in your spare time to write about the stuff you make (instead of spending all the time just making stuff) and then posting it online in some capacity -- that's crazy!

The process

This website runs on Next.js and is hosted on Vercel. I wanted to spend some time writing some React and Next just to kinda make sure my full stack muscle did not go untrained with all the backend agentic coding I'm usually filling my days with. So I grabbed an empty repo, npm install next'd and got to work.

I knew that I wanted some kind of strong visual identity for the site, I grabbed a couple of colors that I like--together with the aforementioned Areal typeface--and started laying out the foundation of the website. I also knew that I wanted some analog-ish things on the website, maybe some things that I have drawn by hand and then vectorized/scanned. And also some lino-prints!

I also hand drew the thing above the footer (flowers on this page) and scanned and vectorized it.

After creating and collecting some assets that I liked I went ahead with the programming of the site. I went with TypeScript and Next.js with deployment on Vercel due to the ease of use. I really like the easy-to-set-up CI/CD that Vercel gives out of the box. I thought that would be a key component for me to be able to update these blog posts on my phone and then just yolo and push to main. I'm using Resend and their API to send the emails to my inbox from the Contact form.

What's next?

I want to create some small extra things here on the site, like a theme selector that lets you pick the colors of the site. I feel like that would be something that I would find fun to mess around with and find new combinations. In addition, it would be super nice to have some interactive AI thing. Still on the drawing-board stage on that one, let's see what I end up putting here.

Anyways, just wanted to make this short post to tell the world about the new site, and to say welcome!

Thanks for stopping by!

Niklas