Portfolio 2024 massive update: gaming aesthetics! 🎮✨

ruizlabdesign
Jun 15, 2024
3 min read

Updated: Dec 29, 2024

As a Product Designer, I was really bothered by the fact that my own portfolio was soooo boring lol. I’ve been working on incredibly great projects since 2022 and I was surprised how fast my own website got in such desperate need of an update 😂

So I’ve been working on this project these last months and I’m so happy to finally share the new arts!!! I wanted my portfolio to have many more illustrations, which I love very much making. They can take a long time to get done (I sketch by hand, then digitalize, then illustrate), so it was a big challenge.

As a player, I accepted to be victorious and conquer this new game level, so here're the results!!!

My goal was to give my portfolio an entirely new personality; inspired in games, isometric art, pixel art, arcade style and dreamy aesthetics combined, and the medium was vector art - my favorite medium to illustrate so far! Brand colors are the same, but in a new, much more fun to look at & interact way.

New icons, buttons and UI elements

I also have some new digital illustrations from this & last year around the blog, if you wanna check the articles (click here to read more articles). And I'll be updating on Dribbble too!

Classic isometric world

I love 2D pixel gaming aesthetics! Designing this classic isometric illustration to be inspired on this game genre was something I wanted to make for a long time. It reminds me of college; I've done so many 2D games that were arcade-inspired and had a great deal of fun illustrating back then. I'm really happy that I could not only illustrate, but also make the icons hoverable so it gives a game-like experience for desktop users. It's also clickable on mobile, just like classic game UIs.

Dreamy Isometric world

I had a hard time deciding how to design representations of Product Design processes. Illustrated icons were getting too weird so I decided to just describe them in a way that resembled 2D/pixel art/arcade games. An isometric path with motion was the chosen design, as I wanted it to remind those classic game-maps screens! I also needed an illustration to match the page's front-end aesthetics (double columns) and the portfolio's new aesthetics, so I used another isometric art to wrap it up. Here're the results:

New chibi mascot

This chibi is not really new, I actually designed it to my influencer portfolio as a mascot lol But in this portfolio, the mascot is wearing mostly pastel colors to match the new aesthetics. Colors were chosen to match our current logo!

404 chibi mascot 🚧

I also needed a chibi for the "Under Construction" pages around the website, so it was a lot of fun to illustrate the mascot as a construction worker/painter. Such a responsible little chibi!

Well done & badges

My portfolio is all about positivity, so a well done badge is adorable to illustrate the awards spot in my about page. Do you like it?

There're also level badges to describe my software levels in a fun, game-like way! Which of your skills are in Epic levels?

Mobile version

And there is also the mobile version!!! You can browse and have a similar experience on your phone with illustrations, new effects and new designs (tip: desktop is way more fun tho because of the game-like controls, check it out! But you can also have a nice experience on your phone).