hexpaper, the first portfolio.
the site this site replaces. retired with affection.
hexpaper was the first version of marco.win, built in 2021 when i was eighteen and my entire visual vocabulary was "dark theme with one purple accent." it had three pages: a home, a project list, and a contact form. it was held together with a single tailwind config and a great deal of confidence.
i kept it live for four years. it served a few hundred unique visitors a month, mostly recruiters and occasional friends. then the design started feeling embarrassing in a way that made me reluctant to share the link, which is the threshold at which a personal site has stopped doing its job.
what it taught me
three things, in order of importance:
- typography is most of the design budget. hexpaper had one display font and one body font, and they were both fine, and "fine" turns out not to be enough.
- a personal site is not a resume. it's the room you invite people into. it should look like a place you'd want to be.
- hosting on vercel for free for four years is, on reflection, a bit much.
this site replaces it. the old domain redirects. the github repo is archived but readable. some of the bones are still here — the routing model, the markdown blog pipeline — but the visual language is unrecognisably different. i hope.