PRE-S: One of the companies I've interviewed for Inside Marketing Design (Help Scout!) is hiring a brand designer. Check out the role on my job board right here. From what I learned from your potential new colleague Matt Plays in the interview, it's a fantastic place to work.

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Hey Reader,

Every now and then I see a site that makes me fall back in love with the art of web design. I spend so much of my time thinking about the science side of it: improving conversion rates, creating systems, crafting user flows… that I forget that websites can be simply beautiful too.

I spotted Niccolò Miranda’s gorgeous portfolio site on Twitter recently and I just had to share a few of my favourite parts of it with you in this weeks issue, along with the latest episode of Inside Marketing Design.

Let’s go!

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Inside Marketing Design at Loom

I chatted with Stewart Scott-Curran about all things brand design at Loom recently. It was super interesting to hear about how he's structured his team (including a Brand Strategist role) and the process they went through for their recent rebrand that involved the entire brand team; designers and non-designers alike.

​Check out the episode on the Inside Marketing Design YouTube channel here.

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Getting creative with a personal website

Niccolò Miranda’s portfolio site is one of the coolest I’ve ever seen. I’m heavily biased in saying this: I love when print formats are replicated in cool new ways on the web, and I love a newspaper-inspired design especially (it’s what I did for my design school thesis project). But this bias is kind of my point.

What’s good in art is subjective. So it can be with design too.

While I highly recommend you check out the site for yourself, here are a few of my favorite details.

The typography is beautiful. The site uses Canopee for the headings and Editorial New (fitting!) for the body copy, and I love the extreme contrast in type sizes that we see throughout the site. It makes it fun to skim. This typography combined with the warm neutral color palette and texture would make the newspaper inspiration apparent even if the site wasn't titled "The Paper Portfolio". Subtle details like the 'printing error' horizontal line behind the Think, Create, Deliver on the right are a nice touch too.

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There's more juicy texture as the navigation wipes onto the screen, and more large type used here too. Even the hover state is creative: the letter spacing increases on each word so it expands out from the centre.

The good ol' marquee makes a comeback in the footer with a rotating banner with a mailto link. It's a nice way to draw attention to the CTA without introducing a new color for a button or something like that.

Even more texture greets us on the project pages, with the hero image peeking out from behind a torn page edge. There's some Webflow magic going on here (yep! it's built in Webflow!) to mask the background and the project name too that I absolutely love. Niccolo could have easily used a similar format to the homepage for project headers (having the feature image in a box in the hero section) but introducing this different formatting and added texture is a nice touch to show some variation.

Portfolio sites are just about the only place I think ‘scroll-jacking’ is acceptable, and there’s a nice use of it in the ‘Work’ section as you scroll through the projects almost like looking at spines of a book on a shelf.

Looking at Niccolo’s site makes me want to do something so much more creative for my own! How about you?

If anything, I hope that sharing this example shows you that a portfolio site doesn’t have to follow the usual format of a grid of projects stacked neatly in rows of 3. We have to think so much about conversion and user journeys in the sites we design for clients or the company we work at, and while this stuff is still important in our portfolios; we can achieve it in a more creative way if we wish.

Like many of you I’m sure, I don’t actually have an up-to-date portfolio online right now (‘design portfolio site’ has been on my to do list for several years at this point…) but it is something I want to make time for next year. charlimarie.com is well overdue for a design refresh!

Whenever I do get started on that, I will of course share the process in YouTube videos. Hold me to it!

Hope you have a good week,

Charli