One downside to stumbling upon personal websites and portfolios you really enjoy is that it invites comparison and can make you hate your own site and want to tear it down and start over from scratch. At least that’s my experience. But the upside is you get inspired by other people’s creativity and hopefully bring that into your own work. I’ve been visiting a lot of personal websites lately, and wanted to highlight three that I am especially fond of (using each site’s own meta title/description/favicon):

• Eva Decker: “Eva is a designer and web developer based in NYC.”

• iamrobin: “robins own little space on the internet”

• anhvn: “anhvn.com is a personal website.”

It sure is. And it appears each author is some combination of developer, designer and artist. The thought behind these sites is so considered and the craft is so skillful: eva.town showcases multiple disciplines from the homepage (including a wildly slick synth) and promotes community from the webrings page, iamrobin has a warm and inviting postcards feature and digital garden, and anhvn has a prolific blog and media diary, including lengthy media recaps of previous year. There’s certainly a lot in these sites that I’m looking to add to my own — a guestbook seems like a fun bit of functionality and community-building to add. We shall see.

Also I was going to post some pictures of certain features I like but you should really experience them for yourself (and I am too lazy to take screenshots right now 😉). Get lost in them for a few hours like I did.