My Digital Crib
My own portfolio, built as a place instead of a page: a pixel-art bedroom on desktop, a “mangophone” on mobile and a cat who helps with the loading bar.
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Introduction
My Digital Crib is my own portfolio, built as a place instead of a page. On desktop it is a pixel-art bedroom you explore; on mobile it becomes a small phone operating system, the mangophone, with its own apps. There is a cat to pet, a loading bar that talks back and a lot of small details to find.
The challenge
Make a portfolio people remember. Every designer has a grid of projects. I wanted a visitor to feel like they had walked into someone’s room, in English or Spanish, and want to poke around.
The approach
Treat the portfolio as a set of scenes. The desktop room and the mobile phone are separate experiences that share one translation layer, so every string exists in English and Spanish. The room and the phone are hand-built in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, so the whole thing stays light and easy to change.
Visual direction
Pixel art, one pixel typeface (VT323) and a dark, warm room lit by a desk lamp. Some of the objects are real: Emma, my cat, has her own cameo on the loading bar.
Website experience
You enter with or without sound, get a short tutorial, then explore. The computer opens a Windows XP-style desktop, the Nokia opens a tiny phone with its own apps, and the posters, notes and objects hold the rest of the portfolio.
Responsive design
Below tablet width the room hands over to the mangophone: a full mobile OS with a home screen, apps, photos, notes and the resume, rather than a shrunken desktop.
Outcome
It did its job: people remember it. It also taught me the lesson this site is built on. An experience can be memorable and still make a client work too hard to learn what I do. So the Crib now lives as the experiment, and this site does the explaining.