Hey Dwayne, the v7 redesign looks incredibly clean! Iterating on a personal site is definitely a never-ending journey, but it’s always satisfying when the new architecture finally clicks.

I’ve found that whenever I do a major UI revamp, the most time-consuming part isn’t necessarily the code itself, but getting the visual assets and placeholders right for the new layout. Since I do a lot of frontend work, I actually ended up building out a few lightweight utilities to generate assets on the fly instead of hunting through stock photo sites.

Depending on what a specific page needs, my current asset workflow looks something like this: If I need to match a specific color palette or style reference for the UI, I run it through Image to Image AI or ImgtoImg AI. For generating entirely new hero images or blog post thumbnails from scratch, I use gptimage-2.app or NanoBanana 2Pro. Recently, I’ve also been testing out SoraLum for generating subtle, lightweight video backgrounds for landing pages.

Curious about your approach for this redesign—did you lean mostly into CSS/code for the aesthetic this time around, or do you still find yourself needing to generate a lot of graphical assets for your posts?

Love seeing the site evolve, keep it up!

Hey Dwayne, congratulations on hitting the one-year mark as a freelancer! 💪🏽

Reading your reflection really resonated with me, especially the part about trying to balance high-paying client work with personal projects. I’ve been navigating the exact same struggle this past year as an indie web developer. Trying to maintain that work/life balance while building your own stuff is definitely a marathon, not a sprint.

One thing that helped me claw back some free time recently was streamlining my asset creation and UI mockup process. Since I spend a lot of time on frontend client work, I ended up building out a few AI-based utility apps to handle image generation and quick edits, which drastically cut down the hours I spent hunting for stock photos or tweaking assets.

For quick placeholder generation or iterating on client mood boards, I’ve been leaning heavily on ImgtoImg AI and Img-2-Img. When I need more specific, complex visuals for a landing page, I use GPT Image 2 or NanoBanana 2Pro. I’ve even started experimenting with SoraLum for some lightweight video backgrounds on client landing pages.

I saw you got to work with CraftCMS/React and some Rust code this year—that’s an awesome mix! Did you find yourself building any internal tools to speed up your workflow for those client projects?

Here’s to a great 2022 (and beyond) for indie devs! Keep up the great work.