After years of using Adobe Portfolio to showcase my photography work, I've decided to rebuild my personal website from scratch. The platform served me well, but I wanted more control, better performance, and a design that truly reflects my aesthetic.

Why Astro?

I chose Astro as the framework for this rebuild. It's incredibly fast, ships zero JavaScript by default, and gives me complete creative freedom. The result is a lightning-fast, minimalist site that loads almost instantly.

New Photography Portfolio

My photography has also found a new home on 36 Frames, a platform built specifically for photographers.

36 Frames has been a passion project of mine, built from the ground up, to provide a simple, responsive, beautiful experience for sharing my portfolio with friends and family (more on that soon). It's cleaner, faster, and provides a much better viewing experience for my travel photography and photo essays.

Design Philosophy

The new site embraces minimalism with a simple black and white color palette. I'm using contemporary typography — Instrument Serif for headings and Outfit for body text — both with tight letter-spacing for that modern, editorial look.

The design automatically adapts to your system's light or dark mode preference, and you can toggle between themes with the button in the top-right corner. Importantly, the site is completely stateless — no cookies, no tracking, no localStorage — so there's no need for annoying cookie notices.

Built with AI Assistance

This entire site was built with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic's AI), working through Cursor. The iterative design process — from initial colorful gradients to the final minimalist aesthetic — was a collaborative conversation between human intent and AI execution. It's fascinating how AI can help translate design ideas into code while maintaining high-quality, modern web development practices.

Technical Stack

The site is built with:

  • Astro 5 — Modern static site generator
  • Google Fonts — Instrument Serif & Outfit (updated to: Noto Sans)
  • CSS Custom Properties — For clean theme switching
  • Zero JavaScript — Except for the theme toggle
  • Privacy-first — Using Simple Analytics cookie-less privacy-first analytics

Open Source

The complete source code for this website is shared on GitHub. Feel free to use it as inspiration for your own projects, or learn from the implementation.

Here's to new beginnings and creative control! 🎨