Design audit — four skins in two days
Oct 12, 2026
Most portfolios show the final skin. This notes the whole trail, because the revisions are the interesting part — and because "how does this person make design decisions" is a fair interview question.
Round zero — consolidation
Before any design: four stale CV sites (napjose.ph, profile.napjose.ph, napjose.ph/calub, lebenslauf.napjose.ph) collapsed into one repository with a typed data layer, six case studies, and migrated writing. The design brief that survived every round since: look like a senior engineer who builds, thinks, and iterates.
Round one — editorial minimal
Serif headlines on cream paper, burnt-orange accents, generous rhythm. Fine, quiet, and — in retrospect — indistinguishable from a thousand template portfolios.
Round two — the de-slop pass
An audit against unslop.site's reference catalog removed the tells that mark a site as AI-assembled: the default sans body, pill chips, arrow glyphs, status dots, card grids, rounded everything. Featured work became a numbered ruled index. Useful discipline; the rules that survive today are square corners, no decorative glyphs, no card grids, no pill chips.
Round three — Mustard/Guild
A saturated-poster experiment from an unslop reference: mustard ground, brown ink, cream surfaces, heavy display type, 2px ledger rules. Committed and shipped. Honest verdict: it read as vibecoded. Saturated color plus bold display is precisely what every generated portfolio looks like in 2026. Saturation was doing the work content should do.
Round four — quiet technical (current)
The keeper. Near-monochrome paper and ink, hairline rules, one signal green, monospace as a first-class voice for labels and numbers. The distinctiveness budget is spent on things that are harder to fake: a wireframe pipeline rendered in three.js, headline text laid out with pretext, and build-time telemetry baked into the HTML — every signal names its source.
The principle across all four rounds: aesthetic is a budget. Spend it on craft signals that demonstrate judgment, not on saturation that broadcasts the average of current trends.