Dhruvil Patel

Why I rebuilt my site as a drawing sheet

Every builder portfolio looks the same now. Here's what I kept, what I dropped, and the one idea the whole site hangs on.

1 min read

  • design
  • meta
Pixel-art drawing sheet with ruler ticks, registration marks and a title block

Most personal sites for engineers share a skeleton: a photo, a sentence, some links, a list of jobs, a grid of projects, a contribution graph. That skeleton works. The problem is that the skin has converged too.

So I kept the skeleton and changed the frame. The page is laid out like an engineering drawing sheet: a faint grid, a hairline border, and a title block under the name that carries the facts a sheet needs. Role, location, local time, status.

What I kept

  • One column. Wide columns make you scan; one column makes you read.
  • The contribution graph. It's the only honest "live" signal on a site like this.
  • A command menu. ⌘K gets you anywhere in two keystrokes.

What I dropped

  • Eyebrow labels above every heading.
  • Cards for everything. Only featured projects get one.
  • Any animation that isn't the page-load reveal.

A code block, so you can see the styling

src/config/site.ts
export const site = {
  name: "Your Name",
  role: "Design engineer",
  location: "Somewhere, Earth",
  timezone: "Asia/Kolkata",
  availability: { open: true, label: "Open to work" },
};

That's it. Everything else on the page is a list.

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