Designing a Personal Portfolio Website–Web Design Process: Built By Hand Ep 3
Chris Do's Creative Director Ben Burns confronts the universal struggle of designing for yourself in this raw look at the creative process.
Chris Do
Founder, The Futur™ · July 16, 2021
The Designer's Dilemma
Designing for yourself is hard. It is the one project where you are the expert, the subject, and the sole decision-maker. It should be the easiest brief you ever get. Yet, it is almost always the hardest.
It is the project that amplifies every fear, every doubt, every insecurity. You are too close to see clearly. As Ben Burns, Creative Director at The Futur, puts it, “it feels like you're this close to the work you know so close that you can't see things.”
For years, Burns’s personal website was the only project he had never finished. It lingered as a testament to this creative paradox. In his series Built By Hand, he embarks on a journey to finally complete it, pulling back the curtain on the often-painful reality of the creative process.
This is not a simple story about web design. It is a story about the fight. The fight against the blank page, against the inner critic, and against the crushing weight of your own expectations.
The False Start
Every creative project begins with a plan. For Burns, the strategy was clear and, to some, controversial. He starts every website design with the desktop layout. Not mobile.
“I know, I know, I know, mobile design mobile first is a thing,” he admits. “But you know what, I just don't like it. You're just gonna have to deal with it.”
This isn't just a contrarian take. It is a workflow decision rooted in practicality. Burns focuses on two specific pages to establish the entire design's foundation:
- The Home Page. He considers it the hardest page to design on any site, but also the one with the most room for creativity. Tackling it first gets the biggest challenge out of the way.
- The Blog Post Page. This page is a typographical workhorse. It contains every text element, from headings and paragraphs to lists and blockquotes, making it the perfect sandbox for finalizing the site's typographic system.
Armed with mood boards from his research phase, Burns began moving pixels. The initial energy was high. He experimented with layouts, blocks, and artboards. But quickly, the momentum stalled.
The first designs felt wrong. “Gimmicky,” he says, looking back. Something was missing. The work wasn't living up to the vision. The excitement from the research phase evaporated, replaced by a familiar sense of disappointment.
“I spent a good chunk of the day working on something that I don't know if I'm really proud of,” Burns reflects. “It's not living up to the expectation that I had when I sat down to design.”
He had hit the first wall. It is a moment every creator knows well. The moment when the idea in your head fails to translate to the canvas in front of you.
The Curse of the Creative
This is where the real work begins. The initial failure triggered something deeper than simple frustration. It tapped into a vein of self-doubt and professional anxiety that runs through the core of the creative identity.
Designing for yourself is hard. But it is hard for reasons that go beyond aesthetics. It's because there is no client to provide validation. There is no external force to say, “Hey, this is good.” Without that feedback loop, the creator is left alone with their own inner critic, a voice that is rarely kind.
“These projects where I'm designing for myself seem to just like amplify any of the fears or stresses or doubts,” Burns explains. “It just it makes those things feel bigger somehow.”
This internal pressure was compounded by external stress. A cross-country move, building a new house, raising two young children, and managing the creative team at The Futur. The chaos of life bled into the creative process, making the incline of the project feel even steeper.
The confidence Burns had felt earlier completely fizzled out. This is the creative low point. A valley of despair where the project feels doomed and, worse, you feel like a failure for not being able to fix it. This is where imposter syndrome thrives.
“There are a lot of eyes on this project and I feel like there's an expectation that just because I'm part of The Futur that means I'm some legendary designer,” he confesses. “The truth is is that I never went to design school. I don't have that pedigree. I'm homegrown and I'm self-taught.”
This fear of being exposed is a powerful, paralyzing force. He calls it a “fear of being exposed as a bad designer.” As soon as an idea is put on the artboard, it becomes vulnerable. It can be judged. And in that judgment, the fear has the potential of being realized.
The creative process, for Burns and many others, is not a joyful skip through a field of ideas. It is painful. It is a constant questioning of decisions, a struggle to bridge the gap between vision and execution. The work of building a strong personal brand through a portfolio site becomes a deeply personal and vulnerable act.
You Are Not Alone
What Burns discovered in this moment of intense self-doubt is a fundamental truth of creative work: he was not the only one who felt this way.
“The personal doubt is just the curse of the creative,” he says. “And I think that great work is just on the other side of that every single time.”
To prove the point, he reached out to other highly respected designers. First, Fabien Barral, the French graphic designer known to the community as Mr Cup. Barral is a staple in the industry, renowned for his gorgeous letterpress work and highly curated collections. If anyone has mastered the creative process, it should be him.
Yet, Barral’s confession sounds remarkably familiar. “The creative process for me is still, I will say quietly, hard,” he explains. “It's not really as smooth as it seems. It's always doubts, failure...There is always this time in the creative process you are like, this is [trash], and then five minutes after, I am so bad.”
Even for a master like Mr Cup, the process is a rollercoaster of self-doubt and breakthrough. The difference is that seasoned creators know the feeling is part of the journey. They trust that if they keep pushing, something will emerge.
Next, Burns turned to his friend Greg Gunn, a creative industry legend and co-founder of the design and animation studio Blind. Gunn’s illustration work is everywhere, and he even produced a short film with Disney. He is no stranger to high-stakes creative projects.
When discussing the unique pain of a personal portfolio, Gunn cuts right to the heart of the matter. Client work gets you close to the project. But a personal website is different. It is not just close, it is you.
“When it's your personal website, it's literally you. You are it,” Gunn says. “It's really difficult not to be really critical and get existential about that.”
The project ceases to be about design and becomes a reflection of your identity, your skill, and your value. This is why it’s so much harder. The stakes feel infinitely higher. Knowing that others, even those at the top of their fields, share this struggle can be a profound comfort. It normalizes the anxiety and reframes it not as a personal failing, but as an integral part of making something meaningful.
The Epiphany of Play
The realization that he was not alone was a comfort, but it was not a solution. The design was still stalled and the frustration remained. The breakthrough came from an unexpected source: his oldest daughter.
An avid artist, she loves to draw with her dad. But as her ambition grew, so did her frustration. While trying to draw a house, she became increasingly upset that her drawings didn't match the image in her mind. Finally, she gave up.
Burns immediately swooped in with the kind of encouragement any good parent would offer. “Hey, you just got to keep trying. Remember we're drawing for fun and it doesn't matter if it's not perfect.”
She listened. She let go of the need for perfection and just started drawing. Her sketchbook filled with little houses, some silly, some funny. She was absorbed in the process. She was giggling. She was playing.
And something incredible happened. Every version got better and better.
Watching her, Burns had an epiphany. He was telling his daughter to do the very thing he had stopped doing himself. He had been so focused on creating the perfect, final design that he had forgotten how to experiment. He had forgotten how to have fun.
He needed to play.
This was the critical reframe. He realized he was holding himself to an impossible standard, expecting a flawless design to flow directly from his mind to the artboard. But the creative process doesn't work like that. It requires experimentation. It requires trying things that might turn out wrong. It requires play.
This shift in mindset is the key to overcoming the creative low point. Stop trying to make something perfect. Start trying to make something. Anything. This approach aligns with the principle that you should not wait for inspiration to strike, but rather create the conditions for it to appear, a theme often explored in discussions of originality and creativity.
With this newfound perspective, Burns got back to work. Not to achieve a final result, but to play.
From Block to Breakthrough
The shift from pressure to play opened up a new world of possibilities. Instead of forcing a layout, Burns started experimenting with elements he found interesting. He pulled in a new display typeface, Vultura, a high-contrast font with funky, brush-stroke-like details by Vocal Type Co.
“I just kind of fell in love with it,” he says. He played with a layout where a large, outlined version of the typeface filled the screen, revealing a background image on hover. The gimmicky feeling was gone, replaced by something interactive and engaging.
This playful experimentation led to a series of breakthroughs that formed the backbone of the new design:
- The Grid. He established a five-column grid that was asymmetrical but felt balanced. This provided a strong structure for all other elements.
- The Color Palette. He began finalizing a color scheme that felt right, departing from his earlier, less-inspired attempts.
- The Typographic Hierarchy. With the grid and colors in place, he started building out a complete typographic system, defining the relationship between all text elements.
At this point, Burns distinguishes between two core typographic concepts. They are not the same thing.
A type scale is a set of type sizes that work harmoniously because they relate to each other proportionally. A simple example is starting with a 16px paragraph and doubling the size for each level up the hierarchy: 32px, 64px, and so on. The scale is about the mathematical relationship between sizes.
A type system is how you apply that scale. It is the set of rules that dictates which size from your scale is used for primary headings, which for sub-headers, and which for body copy. Establishing this system early is crucial for creating visual consistency.
Inspired by the process of other designers like Sebastian Stapelfeldt, known for his incredibly detailed fictional user interfaces, Burns also returned to an old-school tool: a sketchbook. Stapelfeldt often sketches basic shapes and concepts on paper before moving to the screen. Burns realized he had abandoned this practice mid-project.
He grabbed a sketchbook and started thumbnailing ideas for the full-screen menu, a feature he knew he wanted but couldn't visualize. On paper, the ideas started to flow. He designed several options and brought them back into his design software, feeling a renewed sense of clarity and momentum.
He had hit a flow state. “If you've been here, you know exactly what I mean,” Burns says. “You get it. You know what things are supposed to look like, you speak the language, and it just flows out of you.”
The Unseen Struggle
After days of struggle and doubt, Burns finally had a design he was proud of. It was asymmetrical, the type felt personal, and the grid was strong. “I'm pretty pumped and I'm also surprised,” he admits. “I'm happy with it.”
But the finished design is not the point of this story. The point is the journey to get there. The real lesson is hidden in the ugly, frustrating, and often un-televised parts of the process. The design industry is saturated with polished final products on Dribbble and time-lapses that make creativity look like magic. This polished narrative is a lie.
“I think we in design culture are losing touch with the hidden struggle,” Burns argues. “That secret beast, the looming deadline and the sleepless nights that we don't talk about...the anguish that people go through when they're trying to make something beautiful.”
This series is an attempt to make that struggle visible. It is for every creative who has hit a brick wall, who has never felt truly happy with their work, who has felt like the odd one out while pushing a boulder up a hill every day.
The creative process often follows a predictable, painful pattern, famously articulated by Ira Glass of This American Life. It can be visualized as a graph:
- You start a project at a baseline, feeling okay.
- You get inspired, and your excitement shoots up.
- You create your first version, and it falls drastically short of your vision. It sucks.
- You internalize this failure. “It sucks” becomes “I suck.”
This is the low point. The valley of despair. And this is where most people stop. This is where projects die and self-doubt wins.
But the key is to keep pushing. The journey from “it sucks” to “it’s okay” and eventually to “it’s actually pretty good” is paved with relentless work. This is what Ira Glass calls closing The Gap: the distance between your taste, which is often excellent, and your current skill level.
Every piece of work you create helps close that gap a little more. Abandoning ship at the low point ensures the gap remains forever. Many creatives could benefit from exploring their mindset, a topic covered by experts on how to master pricing and creative blocks, as this struggle is as much psychological as it is technical.
Here is the bottom line.
You'll never create anything great if you never create anything at all.
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“The personal doubt is just the curse of the creative.”
— Chris Do
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