The day I realized my portfolio thumbnails were basically invisible on mobile

I was at a coffee shop in Portland last month showing my portfolio to a friend on her phone, and she kept squinting at my project thumbnails. Turns out the text overlay I'd carefully designed for desktop view was literally unreadable at 400 pixels wide. That's when I realized I'd been designing my entire portfolio for a 27 inch monitor instead of the small screens most people actually browse on. Has anyone else had that "oh no" moment with their layout behaving completely different on mobile?

2 comments

2 Comments

finleybutler9d ago

Oh man, this hit home hard for me. I had a similar wake-up call when my own portfolio gallery looked like a jumbled mess of tiny boxes on a friend's iPad. Take this with a grain of salt, but I've started designing mobile-first on a smaller browser window now, and it's saved me from a lot of squinting.

the_lee9d ago

Tbh designing mobile-first on a smaller window is smart, but just make sure you're testing on actual devices too. Browser resizing doesn't always match real phone screens.