← Back

Redesigned the Site with Narrative Authority Design

The story of transforming a flat blog into a professional portfolio combining narrative and authority

Design
Next.js
Portfolio

Why Redesign

The existing site was clean but flat. Visitors would arrive, think "oh, it's a blog," and leave. Despite 11+ years of IT experience, 50+ presentations, and diverse community activities, the depth wasn't being communicated.

Two goals:

  • Storytelling (50%) — What journey has this person taken
  • Expertise (50%) — What specific achievements and activities exist

The Narrative Authority Approach

We chose a design direction combining "narrative + authority."

Homepage

BeforeAfter
Generic headline"From Developer to Cloud Infrastructure, N Years of Journey" (dynamic)
Tech chip listImpact Bar (talks, IT experience, OSS projects — auto-calculated)
Project card gridFeatured Work (problem→solution story cards)
OSS sectionSpeaking Highlights

Impact Bar numbers are dynamically calculated from content. Adding a seminar automatically increases the talk count, and the experience years auto-update each year.

About Page

The biggest transformation:

  • Narrative Intro — Journey summarized in one paragraph
  • 3 Role Cards — Engineer / Professor / Community Leader
  • Community Activities — CloudBro, OPA, OPDC
  • Mentoring — K-PaaS competitions, eGovFrame contributions — 9 entries
  • Expert Activities — NIA advisory, SaaS evaluation — 7 entries
  • Awards — From ministerial commendation to OPA Awards — 12 entries
  • Research Reports — NIA commissioned — 5 papers
  • Conference Wall — Auto-extracted from seminar data
  • OSS Contributions — OpenMetadata, KakaoCloud Terraform Provider

Speaking Page

Transformed from a simple yearly list to a timeline UI with Summary Stats and highlighted presentations.

Work Page

Removed Projects/Forks separation, replaced with tag filter + case study cards. Featured projects show "Problem | Solution" in a two-column layout.

Blog Page

Added tag filter, pinned featured post, and reading time display.

Technical Changes

New Packages

  • rehype-pretty-code + shiki — Code block syntax highlighting
  • remark-gfm — GFM table support
  • mermaid — Architecture diagram rendering

Shared Components

Three reusable components extracted:

  • ImpactStats — Numeric stats bar (shared by Home, Speaking)
  • TagFilter — Tag filter chips (shared by Work, Blog)
  • FeaturedCard — Emerald-bordered highlight card (shared by Home, Blog, Speaking)

Design System Unification

All pages unified from hardcoded Tailwind color classes to CSS variable-based design tokens (var(--text), var(--accent), etc.).

MDX Improvements

  • Mermaid custom component for diagram support
  • rehype-pretty-code with github-light theme for code blocks
  • remark-gfm for proper markdown table rendering

Built with AI

This redesign was a collaboration with Claude Code. From brainstorming to design spec, implementation plan, and parallel agent execution — the entire process was done with AI.

Using parallel sub-agents to redesign 5 pages simultaneously proved particularly effective.