My third portfolio was my boldest experiment - a major shift in how I wanted to present my work. I decided to organize all of my projects as a graph, aiming to show years of work at a glance. It was interactive, efficient, and different from anything I’d seen before. At the time, I felt this visual approach would make it easier for visitors to quickly understand the depth and breadth of my experience.

I still think the core idea holds value - optimizing for both speed and structure in a non-linear way is an exciting design space. But over time, my thinking around design matured.

One key lesson I learned from this version is that uniqueness doesn’t always translate to effectiveness. While the graph layout was visually compelling and different, it added complexity that some users found disorienting. I hadn’t fully internalized the principle that *just because something is different doesn’t mean it’s better*.

Similarly, I realized that minimal effort in design doesn’t automatically equal minimalism. True minimalism is deliberate - it’s about clarity, not simply doing less. That distinction reshaped how I thought about user experience, hierarchy, and intentionality in later iterations.