Every Portfolio Website I've Ever Built
I built my first website at 14. Today I'm reviewing them all from 2003 until now.
Buckle up, friends!
This is an interview for Olga Chernogorodova’s project on portfolio websites. For this occasion I dug deep in the archives…
(This email is long and might be cut at some point in your mail app, you can click the title to see it fully in your browser.)
Hey Hugo, how do you perceive your own portfolio: as a self-promotion tool, a work archive, or a personal statement? Or perhaps something else entirely?
All of the above!
Having an up-to-date online portfolio has always been important for me. It’s self-expression. It feels good to have one place where you see all that you have produced over the years. And I love making websites.
I built my first one when I was 14. Let me take you on a journey…
2003
For high school, in the February of 2003, we had to find a business to do an internship at. I chose DOM Digital Online Media in Cologne (fka plenum), a webdesign agency in Cologne, where a friend of my parents used to work and recommended me. (Shout-out Bedriye Hansen <3)
I remember Ralf Hirsching, the art director there, who took care of me. Great people. I learned a lot about webdesign and Photoshop. Most importantly, I was more hooked than ever to become a real designer! In my report I later wrote “I think I have found my dream job…”
2004
After a year of experimentation, my first real website launched in January 2004. I remember asking my sister to take those photos of me, I then cut them out and put one on each page. So cringe and so cute!
End of 2004 seems to have been quite a big jump. I learned Adobe Illustrator and a whole new world was opening up. I was hooked on vector graphics and illustrations. (And wild color combinations, apparently.)
From then on I basically continued every few months with new iterations. The metal optics and portrait-on-every-page-concept got quickly scrapped for more minimal and typgraphic versions:
2005
“for nearly two years i'm into graphic design now. i had to learn most of the things on my own taking tips and advice from books and design related forums. apart from designing, i enjoy doing aikido, playing soccer with my mates, going to the gym or photographing the world.
besides the whole city lifestyle and the people around me, music is my biggest inspiration. it would be hard to create something good, related to art, with no sounds going through my ears. i listen to loads of different styles. at the moment, i enjoy lounge, house and soul music, but i also love hip hop and r'n'b - that depends on my mood.
in the future i will try to improve my skills, especially on traditional art. it’s still quite a long time until i’m able to make my dream come true and work as a professional graphic designer.”
At the end of 2005 I apparently turned away from the stark color combos and the portfolio became a bit more light, fun, and illustrative:
2006
I turned 18 in 2006. A year prior I founded my clothing label PIQTO and the portfolio website got heavily influenced by that! Kolibris and summery gradients:
2007
I made this version right after finishing high school and while I was doing my civil service at the German Red Cross.
At that time I was preparing my application for ECAL, the art and design school in Lausanne, Switzerland.
It got more monochrome and minimal…
Right after I got accepted into ECAL I made a trilingual version:
2008
The first website while studying, with the first student projects. All elements on the page were draggable so you could do your own compositions. I also like the use of whitespace here…nice!
2009–2010
The next years the portfolio filled massively. I also started my blog when I was studying. My Substack of today is a continuation of what I started back then.
Reflections on work and life and everything in between! I always recommend trying to develop your own voice, be it with writing, or some sort of other personal output, to mix in with your portfolio.
2011/2012
This is the version from when I graduated and started working as a Designer at Meiré und Meiré in Cologne.
What stands out here is that I’m mixing graphic design works, videos, quotes and interviews I made for my blog and my Better Mjstakes magazine.
2013/2014
The Light Grey Background phase! Pretty clean. But I introduced many new works from my first time having my own studio…
2015–2017
The Masonry Grid Phase! At this time I was into the Nimbus typeface and heavy use of textures to mix it up and create more funky compositions:
Around this time I was contacted by the design agency 2x4 in NYC. This was before I had an Instagram profile, so this came purely out of discovery of my portfolio website.
I was glad I showed a lot of process and progress over the years, because that’s what made them confident about contacting me: they got an extensive overview of me already. They could see my process, my development over the years, my approach. And we just needed one Skype call to seal the deal: I was going to New York.
I spent three months working fulltime in a trial phase, then I got the offer, signed a contract, sorted the O-1 visa, and stayed for two wonderful years!
2018–2022
In 2018 I moved to Berlin and the website—fittingly—got darker. But also quite elegant featuring the beautiful Canela typeface, which I used a lot at that period.
2022–2025
We moved to Paris and it was time for a new website yet again!
I switched back to white and decided to create an even longer and more dense page with featured projects and big quotes in between them.
I introduced an extensive index of projects in a timeline at the end. I still have the core of this system in place, but kept on advancing it from there.
2026
Heart Head Hands ⊹ HHH ⊹ House Hugo Hoppmann
Building my online portfolio has always been a moment for reflection and a great tool to show my development over the years. It’s important for me to share as much as I can, including older projects and sketches.
Your portfolio is your proof-of-work. Twenty-three years of it, in my case. And it helped me a lot.
Today I’m soft-launching the newest version of my website.
To honor the Grace Jones Icon, which became the symbol of my portfolio, I revived it into a playful 3D object that mirrors all content below, reacts to mouse movement and can be dragged to scale:
The Index features a complete archive and timeline with 90+ projects spanning my whole life. It’s sortable by services, industries and more. When you hover over the single project boxes it reveals additional views and you can use the scaler to adapt the grid size:
You can choose light or dark mode, or let it follow your system settings:
Many projects have in-depth case studies with dedicated pages (more are in the works!)
The Canvas Mode shows you all works in an infinitetly draggable masonry grid to roam and explore:
How do you think the role of a designer will change in the next 5-10 years? And what, in your opinion, will remain the fundamental and unchanging core of the profession?
The tools will keep changing. They always have. Very soon, the technical barrier to “make things look good” will be essentially zero.
Which means the designer’s role shifts from being the person who can execute to being the person who knows why something should exist in the first place.
More editorial. More directorial. Less pixel-pushing. More meaning-making. The designers who thrive will be the ones who can hold a vision, make decisions with their own unique point of view, and bring develop a taste that no tool can generate on its own.
What will stay: The magic of the process. I love making-of’s and behind-the-scenes. Let people see how you think, not just what you ship. That’s where trust gets built, between you and the client, between you and your audience.
Make it so personal it becomes universal. This is the whole game. Show your human side. Be soulful. AI can optimize. AI can iterate. But it can’t sit with the discomfort of a blank page and decide to make something anyway. That’s still on us. That’s the core of the profession. And that’s not going anywhere.
What visual codes, tools, or methods do you use in your portfolio to express what kind of designer you are?
Your personal website is your playground! It’s the one space where nobody’s briefing you, no client is asking for revisions.
I recommend not just having purely a work showcase, but actually showing who you are. What do you care about? What’s your weird obsession? Put that in there. I have a magazine I publish, make videos, write a newsletter, and run a community. All of that is part of how I design. It’s not separate from the work, it is the work.
In the future this will be even more important. Again, the powerful differentiator is your humanness. Your sensibility, your story, your specific way of seeing the world. That can’t be replicated.
So don’t be shy. Show personality. The portfolio that feels like a person made it, with all their quirks and jeckness, will always stand out against the one that just looks professional. Soulful is the advantage.
Your website is your proof-of-work. It’s the legacy of what you have built over the years. It’s your story. Go do your portfolio.