Portfolio Website

Overview

Designed and developed preritayadav.com — a portfolio that rejects template conventions in favor of an interactive canvas experience. Built with Next.js and tldraw, the site uses hand-drawn shapes, wobbly borders, and a sketch-like visual language to turn the portfolio itself into a piece of design work.

The Challenge

Designer portfolios tend to look the same — clean grids, sans-serif type, predictable layouts. The challenge was building something that felt genuinely personal and memorable while remaining functional, accessible, and professional. The site needed to be a portfolio and a demonstration of design thinking simultaneously.

Process

1. Concept Exploration
2. Visual Language Definition
3. Component Design
4. Canvas Architecture
5. Development
6. Iteration

Approach

I explored the idea of a hand-drawn canvas as the primary interaction model — treating the portfolio like a living sketchbook rather than a collection of pages. Using tldraw as the rendering engine, I designed custom shape components (project cards, annotations, buttons), developed the wobbly visual language, and built a browse-only interaction mode that lets visitors navigate without editing tools.

Key Contributions

• Conceived the hand-drawn canvas concept as a portfolio medium
• Designed custom tldraw shapes for project cards, annotations, buttons, and image frames
• Developed the wobbly, sketch-like visual language with deterministic randomness
• Built responsive canvas layouts for all pages using a layout creator pattern
• Implemented browse-only interaction mode with custom cursor and hover states
• Created accessible navigation alongside the visual canvas for screen readers

Outcome

A one-of-a-kind portfolio experience that doubles as a demonstration of design and development craft. The hand-drawn aesthetic creates a memorable first impression, the canvas-based navigation invites exploration, and the technical implementation showcases the ability to bridge design vision with engineering execution.