Projects

Iryna Baranova

What I did Built it from her designs
Client Iryna Baranova, Berlin
Stack Laravel, no front-end framework
Shape One page, seven sections
Status Live
The Iryna Baranova home page: a dark green ground, a large cream headline reading Product & UX Designer, Berlin, and a photograph of her in front of the Brandenburg Gate.
Home The top of the page. Dark ground, cream type, her photograph given the whole left column.

What it needed

Portfolio for a product and visual designer in Berlin. Her designs, my Laravel build.

Iryna is a product and UX designer in Berlin. Eight years, a fine-art eye, most of it spent in medtech, SaaS and early-stage products. When she came to me she had the designs for her own site finished, and no site.

A designer’s portfolio is a peculiar thing to be handed, because the site is the argument. On most projects a developer can round a corner, move a margin four pixels, swap a typeface for one that loads more easily, and nobody is ever the wiser. Here every one of those is a small lie about how she works.

So the brief was narrow and unusually strict: build the drawings. Where something couldn’t survive contact with a real browser, ask her – don’t fix it on the way past.

The work section: four client logos above three dark cards showing ScienceBank, Banting AI and St. Jude Cloud.
Work Client logos, then the three pieces she is cleared to show.
The experience section, listing roles at UareUX, Toptal and Ester Digital with dates and descriptions.
Record Eight years listed plainly, with the roles inside a job kept inside it.

How it is built

Laravel from scratch. No theme, no page builder, no CSS framework.

A template would have fought this layout at every turn: a dark full-bleed ground, a headline that sets its own measure, three case cards that break the grid they sit in. It is cheaper to write the markup than to argue with someone else’s.

The whole stylesheet ships inside the document – about 35 KB of CSS and not one stylesheet request, so nothing above the fold is waiting on a second round trip. Two font files, self-hosted: General Sans at 400 and 500, 45 KB together. No third weight, no icon font, nothing called from Google.

The front end has no framework either. Two hand-written JavaScript files, one for behaviour and one for the scroll animations. The finished page is 26 requests and a little over a megabyte, and 900 KB of that is her work rather than my plumbing.

Where it landed

One page, top to bottom.

No Work page, no About page, no Contact page. A portfolio split across four routes asks the person deciding whether to email you to click three times before they know anything, and most of them don’t.

So it is one scroll: the argument, the client logos, the three pieces of work she is cleared to show, the eight-year record, where to find her, and an FAQ that answers what people actually ask before they hire a designer.

My half of it is invisible if it worked. The site looks like the file she sent, which on this job was the entire specification.