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?
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!