The portfolio site
Design & front-end
No build step
0 deps
CSS Grid
Vanilla JS
A portfolio built by hand: HTML, CSS and JS I typed myself. No template, no visual editor, no framework. One page, a panel that follows you down it, and every project written up with the decisions in it.
Role
Design, build & the writing
Year
2026
5
files
0
dependencies
28
aria attributes
01 — The constraint
One rule, and the rest follows
The site has one job: be the thing somebody looks at before deciding whether to write to me. That audience is small and in a hurry. A café owner in Kiel. A practice with a phone number and nothing else. A studio wanting a second pair of hands. Most of them arrive on a phone, on mobile data, with one thumb. So it had to open fast, say what I do inside the first screen, and prove it by being built well rather than by claiming to be. A portfolio that takes its time arguing it can build a fast website has already lost the argument.
There was exactly one rule: if it does not fit in a file I typed myself, it does not go in. No framework to hide a bad layout behind, no build step standing between what I wrote and what ships, and no dependency quietly growing. Every byte a visitor downloads is one I chose. That is the whole constraint, and it decided every other decision on the site.
02 — Design decisions
Why it looks like this
Five decisions, and each one is visible in the figures below. The clips run silent and without controls: they are figures that move, not a video player.
The panel, at 1440px
The work grid, on hover
The nav, marking state
03 — Honest leftovers
What is still wrong with it
The idle log is localStorage only, so it looks social and is not. The counted numbers are a snapshot of one commit and they will drift the moment I edit any of these files. And this page has since moved on: the portfolio became a studio site, with a top bar instead of the panel and the work running full width. What you see above is the finished portfolio, not what sits at the same address today. I would rather leave that here than quietly fix it in a screenshot.