Retrospective behind Dualistique 3.0

Welp, as the saying goes, the cat is out of the bag. But unintentionally, I didn’t want to release the site like this. I was supposed to still have my original site up unit the new site was done. You know, what typical site makeovers tend to do.

But the careless side of me accidentally published over the site during the first day of coding, and I basically wiped out what I had, and only a blank template was present. So that mishap ironically set a fire under me to try to get this whole website done as quickly as possible.

This was a mission that started in December 2024, and now we fast forwarded to February 2025.

The following is just a retrospective of the challenges I’ve face and things I’ve learned on this long marathon.

How did we get here?

As a designer, I’ve come to learn that designing for ourselves is one of the hardest phenomenons in the creative industry. You may be thinking, if you are your own client then shouldn’t it be easy to make something you like?

Maybe some creatives can contest it, but I feel like making something for yourself is harder because innately we are our own worst critic. So a lot of times, the design process for creating our own portfolio is just our voices in our head bickering amongst each other and deciding what shade of red is best for us.

I can also attribute a lot of our hesitation in creating something good for ourselves is our immediate gravitation to a form of imposter’s syndrome or comparison. So many creators out there, and all of them are doing amazing and fun things. Sometimes we try to mimic some design styles to fit our aesthetics, and it often looks odd or out of place.

Our work is actually our personality

During my course of my design career, I’ve actually started to see an interesting trend. The time and creativity we want to splurge for ourselves in our own projects, actually ends up in our work for our clients. That’s where a lot of interesting magic comes into fruitiion.

Ever come across something so odd in an app or game that it doesn’t seem like it fits there, but it does? Most often it’s probably some designer/programmer wanting to try something they’ve wanted to always try for themselves, but it just happened to be for a client project. So knowing this, I’ve begun to care less about the overall visuals of how my portfolio looks, because within the client projects I showcase and talk about, the fun delightful moments are in there.

Non-stop journey to perfection

Always something more you can do. Always something missing. Always one extra thing.

I suffered a lot in the ending wrap-up of the site. And in general, the core site was done pretty early. But getting lost and tripped up over small things, or adding small enhancements definitely slowed the progress a bit. The animations I implemented on the site took a lot of time to figure out, but I’m glad I took the time to understand it for Webflow.

Now I just have a better understanding of how things work on Webflow to implement for future clients and projects.

And another thing….I always felt I need to finish X before I can launch the site. There are just many things I wanted to complete e.g. integrating the shop, making products so the shop doesn’t look bare, making sure the case study are fun to read but still deliver personality, and trying to add some value on the site so people can also leave the site with a thought in mind.

The idea is to turn my website into a hub for many things whether it’s for people that enjoy designed panda merch, or an upcoming designer needed direction in their career.

I’ve learned perfection is quite hard to achieve, or can it be achieved at all? Something I struggle at times to be able to let some process and ideas take their course.

As I’m writing, I’ve already see some things I need to change on the website.

Sidenote:

Some fun shots of previous Dualistique website versions.