V6 (2024)

bencuan.me v6

This year marked a major shift in design philosophy. In every past iteration, the website was the focus in itself, raising the opportunity to figure out the limits of my design/engineering abilities at the time. But this time around, the redesign was purely functional. I have actual real content for once, and it needs a place to live!

With that in mind, I prioritized engineering design over visual design for this year's makeover. The primary goals were twofold:

1. Find a build system that I could stick with for years to come, regardless of website content or structure
2. Make a platform to publish content on (blog posts, recipes, and so on)

I ended up going with Astro and am really enjoying it! It's easily the fastest and most flexible SSG I've tried so far (beating out all of Gatsby, Eleventy, Jekyll, and Hugo) given that it can mix and match most of the popular templating languages.

For more info, see the colophon.

Anyways, I have big plans for the future of this website-- hope y'all enjoyed this version while it lasted :)

V5 (2022)

I am happy to announce that the job search was successful this year! 😄
As such, the purpose of my website has changed a bit-- I can now omit things that employers care about, and focus solely on showcasing all the fun things I'm proud of making.

This year's design was a step back from the flashy animations and colorful highlights. I carried out the design process with the intention of creating a site that's snappy, simple, and easy to build upon in future iterations. Right now, I don't need a cool site- I'd rather let my work speak for itself.

In terms of structural changes, the site now uses Gatsby! I probably don't need that amount of power for such a simple website, but it was worth the experience. Onto Hugo next time!

V4 (2021)

Unlike the past years, this iteration of the website is an incremental update from the previous version, with a few major upgrades here and there. I think this design is maturing to the point where I'm fairly happy with it and don't feel a strong urge to completely redesign it anytime soon.

Changelog

• Color scheme overhaul: make each section more coherent
• Fonts overhaul: cleaner, bolder, and more optimized!
• Add teaching section
• Add landing splash wave animation
• Make favicon round
• Reorganize static files: no more monolithic dist; Netlify builds a public/ directory for deployment!
• Upgrade resume button (now changes color based on section)
• Section colors now change after nav clicks, and not just on waypoints
• Redesigned project link buttons
• More consistent color/design for featured projects
• Content update: resume and new projects
• Update dependencies

V3 (2020)

The newest iteration of the site now live! https://bencuan.me

This year, I completely redesigned the site from the ground up, focusing on simplicity and performance. (The site passes the Lighthouse audits with flying colors- something that cannot be said with last year's!)

One of the highlights was experimenting with code preprocessors. After exploring some options such as Jekyll and Gatsby, I eventually settled on Eleventy due to its flexibility and Node compatibility. Also, I'm now using Sass 😎 These workflow improvements definitely made my life a whole lot easier, and resulted in much cleaner code.

V2 (2019)

View the site here: bencuan.me/2019

This year, I decided to go all out to see what's possible with web design! It's a bit rough around the edges, but I think it captures the essence of the fun and slightly chaotic year that this was. I've been casually getting into art as well, so some of my experimentation with that is featured throughout the site.

Overall, I'm happy with how the animations and layout turned out, but the site very badly needs to be optimized, and doesn't scale well for mobile devices. Next year, I aim to drastically simplify the site and reduce the amount of time needed to navigate around.

V1 (2018)

My first iteration of bencuan.me! This version is available for viewing at bencuan.me/2018.

This is a sky-themed site- the more you scroll down, the further down you descend towards the ground! This time around, I experimented with vector graphics (to create the blimps and hot air balloons) but tried to keep everything simple.