Giving this site the redesign it’s needed for a while

This site has been running on Timber and Tailwind for a while, but if I’m honest it had started to look like exactly what it was: a theme I kept bolting things onto without ever sitting down to design it properly. Pink gradients everywhere, a couple of colour classes that quietly did nothing because they were never defined, dark mode on one page and nowhere else. Time for an actual pass.

The theme runs on Tailwind v4 now, which moves configuration into CSS itself via an @theme block instead of a JS config file. So the first real fix was giving the site an actual design system — ink, paper and primary tokens defined once, instead of scattered pink-500/pink-600/pink-700 classes and a couple of text-primary references pointing at a colour that didn’t exist.

From there it was the usual redesign checklist: a proper type pairing (Space Grotesk for headings, Inter for body text), a shared card component so the work grid and the blog grid stop duplicating the same markup, and a homepage that actually tells you who I am instead of just listing posts. The about page got the same treatment — it used to say, verbatim, “This is a page about jim”. Fixed that too.

Nothing here is a big technical leap. It’s the difference between a site that works and a site that looks like someone meant it to look that way — which, in a portfolio, is most of the job.