The Year Of The New Design Portfolio

I was working on my website like any proper person would, but my attention drifted to something I saw yesterday.

People were feeding screenshots of websites to AI for analysis, and asking the AI to described them as a designer would in a Styleguide.

As you can see this is nice and clever, all these new AI ideas, slay entire industries, it is very scary but also it shows humanity is advancing.

So, as I poking at my website, which AI helped me clean up, the new generation that was out this week, is still limited, but powerful.

I still sense that it is perforated, it could mean it compresses its memory, by summarizing it, and just by the nature by summarization it has holes.

But my project got done and graphics were on my mind, I went back to the more powerful AI that I will let lapse in favor of something better.

And instead of analyzing a screenshot, I looked at the style-guides language, and I told AI, make it cinematic, full-bleed (from corner to corner), stylish.

An my first experiment was just a set of color defining variables, and it worked great, I still use it in my latest design.

But then, why stop here? I downloaded one of the biggest design projects, bootstrap, certainly the most popular one.

And I begun setting up a business, I told the AI, we are building bootstrap themes, that few years ago could almost millions.

And I told it to setup a docker container, and harden it against supply chain attacks, again AI is hard at work there too.

And give me bootstrap, give me the tooling, described in the docs, I gave it examples of themes and products being sold.

And said make me a fruit theme, exactly the fruit you are thinking off, and I gave it the style guide, and the result was amazing.

It dint’ look exactly like the fruit company, it looked better, it was milky and smooth with rounded edges, it just worked.

So again why stop here, I pulled up my sleeves, closed my eyes, and recalled my greatest theme project – Dragonfly, a lovely thing.

I tried to sell it, but it was rejected by a bot, because the files weren’t what they expected, they wanted plain html.

It was in fact a container, with the build system and linux, and all setup with an eye on the future.

I learn by making mistakes, I had no time to read the documentation, you learn a thousand times more the other way around.

And I saw that it was an automated system, with non-ai bots, the top theme sold so well, that it probably belonged to the owner of the shop.

And my biggest take away, was maintenance, they would take 75% of money, for posting the product, and I would be doing all the maintenance work.

I immediately, set up a store like theirs, but here you need taxes, you need to handle charge-backs, and product re-downloads.

So like everyone else, I turned to the genius of WinRar, give it away as non expiring shareware, but expect corporate to pay.

This is still pretty good, but we are back to needing a product, I gave up on the project and begun working on programming languages.

That when brought to completion, would allow the user and today AI, to program the product.

I finished visual programming, I moved to text based visual programming, and dipped back to visual programming of city maps, a success.

And now, I dove into symbolic programming, where AI programs the classical AIs and they become intelligent.

But at the moment, it is hard to go back to the older efficient AI, when every week something huge happens.

Autonomous Agents, Gemma, Supply Chain Attacks, AI Doing Design, Linux getting rooted, to teach closed operating systems a lesson.

So now popcorn in hand as I wait for AI to slow down, I jumped back to my old themes projects.

The first thing I said to the AI and I almost fainted sauing it, was Amber CRTs. Model M keyboards, and Sneakers.

I said, we are going to be the first to create user interface components, that are purely decorative.

We will put a chandelier where modern designers, is you want to call them that, just stick in an flashing LED, or one of those wavy slidy placeholder boxes.

I fully expect to develop component css, html samples, and web components, so a full design chain spanning scss, css, html, js, and hbs and then some.

Just for cool little fantasy use interface animations, that you see in sci-fi movies.

This isn’t something you should program, because of the maintenance, it needs to be left up to AI, which will also take care of bugs mainenance.

This is something yo have to imagine, you have to let your self, get bitten, by the design bug.

If you are like me and enjoy fantasy user interfaces, go to the movies, if you like 3D websites, or 2D pixel art, you need to get cracking.

This is about making products, but for your design portfolio, and the picture you should take away from all of this, is a dashboard.

A dashboard with your name on it, turned to face the world, turned to show everyone how brilliant you are.

High School will give you crappy grades, university will take your savings.

But you will keep your dashboard up and facing the word, so that you can show people what you like.