A retired site

This was my portfolio before this one. I built it in April 2026 and it is no longer online. It is here because it is part of how I got here, not because it is current work.

What I tried

I wanted a brutalist site inspired by stabondar.com: black, off-white, and yellow, big type, Space Grotesk and Space Mono for a retro terminal feel, a preloader, a custom cursor, sound effects with a mute button, and long scroll sequences pinned to the screen. It was built with Next.js, GSAP, Lenis for smooth scrolling, and Howler for sound. The page ran to about 18,000 pixels of scrolling.

How I made it

I used AI in development. The design decisions and the direction were mine: the look, the sections, and what each one should do.

Why I retired it

It was laggy. It ran well locally and had problems in production. I could have fixed that, since debugging is what I am best at, but the bigger problem was that it did not look like I made it. The work on it had also stopped representing me.

What I learned

AI does not really have taste or judgment of its own, at least not yet, even with reasoning. Someone like me, with real experience, taste, and understanding, still beats it at any artistic kind of work.

A few things carried over into this portfolio: proper design approaches, with Swiss design the one that really speaks to me, big display type, and restraint, meaning motion only where it earns its place.