A personal website for designers

Here is the trap, stated plainly: a designer's website is not just a container for the work, it is itself a piece of design being evaluated in real time. A copywriter's site can be plain and the writing still lands. A designer's site cannot be plain in the same way, because the plainness itself becomes the data point — "this is the taste, this is the craft, this is what they'll do to your product." That is a harder brief than most other professions face, and it is also why so many design portfolios never ship. The ambition the job requires and the discipline the format requires pull in opposite directions, and most people resolve the tension by not resolving it — they keep adding, keep polishing, keep pushing the launch back another sprint.

Personal websites by profession argues every field has its own scan-first proof, the thing a reader checks before anything else. For a designer that proof isn't a credential or a client list, it's the page itself, evaluated as a fourth, unlisted work sample. Understanding that changes what "finishing the site" should mean. It doesn't mean adding more. It usually means removing enough that the one thing being judged — taste, applied to a real constraint — is visible instead of buried under everything you know how to build.

The fastest way out of a blank canvas is not building from one

Before the specific ways designer sites go wrong, the honest shortcut worth naming first: reach turns a CV and a photo into a finished one-page site in about twenty seconds, and you can be live at a free yourname.joinreach.app subdomain in under two minutes. For a designer specifically, that speed matters less as a novelty and more as a way to separate two problems usually solved at once, badly: getting a page live, and proving design judgement. reach clears the first in the time it takes to fill in a form, which means the ambition described above can go entirely into the three case studies instead of into the container around them.

It is not the right tool for everyone here: reach makes one page, with no sub-pages and no custom code field, so a designer who wants a scrolling case-study format with its own URL per project, or who wants to hand-build an interaction as a work sample in its own right, will hit the ceiling immediately. If the site itself needs to demonstrate front-end craft — not just visual taste but shipped code — reach is the wrong shape for that, honestly stated. What it solves well is the much more common failure: a designer with real work and no live page, stuck for a year on the "I'll build it properly this weekend" loop. For that person, a draft that exists beats a plan that doesn't, and the draft is editable from there.

The failure modes have names, and they're all the same failure

Four things kill designer portfolios with enough regularity that they deserve to be named rather than gestured at.

The intro animation — a loading screen, a logo draw-on, a two-second delay before the page resolves — exists to signal craft and instead signals that the designer values the demo over the visitor's time. It is the single most common thing a reviewer complains about privately and never mentions to the designer directly.

The custom cursor is close behind it. Replacing the system cursor with a circle or a trailing dot communicates "I can build custom interactions," which is true, and also breaks the one interface convention every visitor already trusts — a worse trade than it looks like at 2 a.m. while building it.

Horizontal scroll on a page with no structural reason to scroll sideways is the third. It photographs beautifully in a portfolio-of-portfolios roundup and works badly for an actual visitor on a trackpad, who now has to fight the page to read it in the order it was written.

The fourth is quieter and does more damage: no contact route that actually works. A designer who spent forty hours on a case-study layout and left "get in touch" as a mailto link buried in a footer has built a beautiful dead end. The site's entire job is to end in an action, and that action has to be one click away from wherever a reader currently is on the page.

What connects all four is the same mistake: each one optimises for "does this look impressive to another designer looking for technique" over "does this work for someone with fourteen tabs open who needs an answer in ninety seconds." Those are different audiences with different patience, and the second one is the one actually hiring.

The reviewer has fourteen tabs open, and design for that

A hiring manager or a creative director reviewing portfolios is doing it in a batch, between other things, on a laptop, with everything else they're supposed to be doing also open. They are not sitting in a dark room giving your site their full attention the way you gave it yours while building it. That mismatch is the single most under-designed-for fact in this field. The site that wins in that context isn't the most impressive one in isolation, it's the one that answers "who is this, is the work good, how do I reach them" fastest, because fast is what the format actually rewards, whatever the designer building it privately wishes were true.

This is not an argument for a boring site. It's an argument for spending the craft budget on the work itself rather than the scaffolding around it. A reviewer with limited patience will forgive a plain layout that gets to strong work in ten seconds. They will not forgive strong work buried behind ninety seconds of scroll-jacking they didn't ask for.

Three projects, chosen on purpose, beat eleven

The instinct to show everything is understandable and wrong. A grid of eleven projects does not read as range to a reviewer moving fast — it reads as an absence of editing, itself a design judgement being made in public, and not a flattering one.

Three well-documented case studies do more work than eleven thumbnails, because a reviewer forms an opinion from the first two or three regardless of how many are on the page, and every project after that mostly dilutes attention that would otherwise have gone to the strongest ones. The useful exercise is picking the three, not adding a fourth. If a fourth project would require softening the story the other three tell together — a weaker outcome, a project you're less sure about — it belongs off the site, not folded in as evidence of breadth. Depth on a small number of real decisions beats breadth.

Two readers want two different kinds of proof

A portfolio is read by at least two audiences who are looking for different things, and conflating them is where a lot of otherwise good sites go soft.

An internal hiring team — the design lead, the manager who will actually work with you day to day — wants to see process: the constraint you were working under, the option you didn't take and why, how the decision survived contact with engineering or a stakeholder who wanted something else. They are hiring judgement, not just taste, and process is the only place judgement is visible.

An agency or client-side reviewer looking for a hire on retainer, or a founder assessing a freelancer, wants the opposite emphasis: the outcome, stated plainly, and evidence the work shipped and did something. They care less about the internal debate over navigation and more about whether the thing exists in production and moved a number. Writing the same case study for both readers usually under-serves one of them. The fix isn't two sites — it's structuring each case study so the outcome comes first, for the skimmer, with the process immediately after for the reader who wants it. Neither audience has to dig.

The version of this problem specific to people selling judgement on a project basis rather than a salary is covered at more length in personal websites for consultants, where the same split shows up in a slightly different shape.

Ship it unfinished, on purpose

The fix for the yearlong stall is not a better plan. It's accepting that the site is allowed to be visibly incomplete on the day it goes live, the same way a growing case-study archive is a strength rather than an admission. Three strong projects and a note that more is coming beats zero projects and a promise. A site that looks like it is being iterated on in public — a project added every few months — reads to a design-literate reviewer as someone actually working, which is closer to the truth than a static, "finished" site that hasn't changed in two years because finishing it became the excuse not to touch it.

This is the same argument portfolio that gets you hired makes about the relationship between a portfolio and momentum: the version that exists and keeps changing does more for a career than the one that stays in a file until it's perfect. For a designer specifically, shipping something small and editing it in public is itself a demonstration of the exact judgement the site is trying to prove — knowing what's good enough to ship is a design skill in its own right, and a portfolio that never goes live never shows it.

Route	Price	Billing
reach	$4.99, or free on a subdomain	per month, or $49/year for a custom domain
Carrd Pro Standard	$19	per year, annual only
Framer Basic	$10	per month, billed annually
Webflow Basic	$15	per month, billed annually

Prices checked August 2026. Framer and Webflow suit a designer who wants to build the site itself as a work sample, with full layout control. Carrd is the cheapest route to a single, honest one-pager with no ambition beyond doing the job. Butternut AI, the other CV-to-site generator here, gets a site live in a comparable time, but its $5 portfolio tier keeps the vendor's badge on and offers no custom domain, and there is no code export at any tier — on top of a seven-person team with no disclosed funding round since 2023.

The honest split: if the site itself needs to demonstrate front-end skill, build it by hand in Framer or Webflow and accept the time that costs. If the work is the demonstration and the site's only job is to get out of its way, reach removes the month of stalling between "I should build a portfolio" and having one, at the cost of a single page you cannot export. Most designers stuck in the yearlong loop this piece opened with are better served by the second option than by the ambitious first draft they keep not finishing.