HelenTran

Let’s get to know you first. Tell us about yourself.

Hello! I’m a Product Designer and I work at Shopify.

I’ve been creating and moving things around on the internet for about twelve years now. I love change so the speed of the industry was a good match for me.

Fun facts about me: I’m afraid of strong winds, have a pretty intense wanderlust, and I spend a lot of my time in comedy clubs.

Cool, so what’s the story behind your website and its design?

It was a very slow process to conceptualize the site as it stands now. It took me many years and many redesigns to understand how I wanted to represent myself online.

I was constantly stuck in the production stage and I always thought it because I didn’t have my own style. I realized, quite recently actually, that conceptually it was weak and I needed to go back to the basics before I jumped into production. My website didn’t align to my values as a Designer.

I’ve always felt that typical portfolios are insufficient at representing individuals holistically. What makes a great Designer to me is much more complex than work samples and I wanted my website to represent that. A timeline and collective was more suitable to what I was trying to do and I find it conceptually satisfying (for the time-being.)

What part of your website is your favourite, and why?

I am quite happy with the inspiration posts that I have. They give a little insight into me, and if anything, they’re useful when I’m feeling creatively blocked.

Technologies, languages, frameworks, or libraries?

JQuery is used for the filters/animations, SCSS for CSS pre-processing and Jekyll and Liquid generate my website files.

I also use Github for version control and people can see my full source code should they decide they’re interested.

Any upcoming changes we should look out for?

I’ve never had the luxury of a good foundation to build upon so in terms of redesigning/restyling that most likely won’t happen for awhile. For now, just new content on a regular basis.

Interview date: 18 Dec 2013Permalink