On the last redesign

For three years I kept this website alive with small commits: a fix here, a new post there, never the rewrite I knew it needed.

Last week I finally shipped v2.0: a full redesign of the layout, content architecture, case studies, and build pipeline.

Why a redesign, and why now

Because I’m about to change chapter. By the end of November I’ll leave the Italian Department of Digital Transformation — a journey that started four years ago. A site that no longer described my work was going to become a problem very soon.

So the goal became simple: make the site say clearly what I do — design systems and product design leadership — and then prove it. The old portfolio talked about projects; it never showed them.

Now every case study opens with context, challenge, and outcome, followed by a curated gallery. The long version is still there, just collapsed by default: skim it in thirty seconds, or expand it and read the whole story.

Main changes

Most of the work happened under the surface. What changed visually is the smallest part of it.

• The styling system was reorganized around Tailwind CSS 4, centralized design tokens, light and dark themes, and locally hosted variable fonts—making the interface more consistent and easier to maintain.
• A shared layout was introduced, with a desktop sidebar and a full-screen mobile navigation system featuring active-page states, keyboard dismissal, and focus management.
• Dark mode now persists across visits through localStorage, while still respecting the system preference by default.
• New structured templates were built for portfolio projects, posts, and workshops. These are more modular, responsive, and driven by structured content data rather than duplicated markup.
• Media handling was improved with responsive images through Netlify Image CDN, srcset, lazy loading, asynchronous decoding, and videos that load only when they enter the viewport.
• Performance was improved through versioned assets, long-lived immutable caching for CSS, JavaScript, and fonts, critical-resource preloading, and deferred loading of the ConvertKit script until user interaction.
• SEO was strengthened with canonical URLs, dynamic meta descriptions and Open Graph tags, fallback social images, a sitemap, robots directives, and Schema.org structured data for the website, profile, articles, and case studies.
• Accessibility received focused improvements, including better footer contrast, meaningful image alternatives and dimensions, semantic galleries, safer external links, and clearer navigation labels.
• Legacy stylesheets and layouts were removed, while permanent redirects were added for older URLs and the Jekyll configuration was simplified.
• The project also explored cross-page transitions during development, but these were ultimately removed from the final version to reduce rendering work and keep the experience lightweight.

What I learned along the way

Four things I’d tell myself before starting again:

1. Ship the structure before the styling. The sidebar and the work layout did more for the site than any visual refinement.
2. Let the content model drive the design. featured.yml exists because the homepage needed to change weekly without a deploy ritual.
3. Don’t run two design styles in parallel. Commenting out the legacy Sass was the moment the refactor became real.
4. Treat transitions and prefetch as design work. They’re the difference between a document and a product.

153 commits and one merge later, the site finally matches the way I actually work.

Go have a look.