A PhD student's
portfolio.

The idea.

The client is a sociology doctoral student at Emory whose work sits at the intersection of race, migration, and the African diaspora. She needed more than a website. Conference season means a card in someone's hand. The job market means a committee at a screen. The brief became one identity that works in both places, plus a site she can keep current herself.

The identity.

The card came first. We explored kente bands, flocks in flight, and adinkra symbols, then kept stripping away until the mark landed: a soft watercolor globe with delicate dotted migration arcs radiating outward. Her research, made visual. No clip art, no noise.

Type: Cormorant Garamond for the display voice and EB Garamond for the body, with lowercase letterspaced labels that carry from the printed card into the site's buttons and tags.

The design.

The printed card is the source of truth for the whole system. Paper white and charcoal ink, with sea blue, land green, sage, and warm ochre pulled from the watercolor globe. The site's hero mirrors the card front: globe art above her name in letterspaced caps. The contact section mirrors the card back: globe, a vertical rule, and a quiet letterspaced contact block. Subtle motion throughout, including headings that wipe in on scroll.

The build, and the part she owns.

Hand-built static HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS. Every word on the site lives in a content file, and a custom admin panel lets her edit her bio, publications, awards, and teaching from any browser. She hits save, the site commits and redeploys itself, and the change is live in about a minute. No developer, no platform, no monthly fee. Live at temi-alao.com.

Why this work.

Academic sites usually pick one of two failure modes: sterile, or amateur. This one carries scholarly weight and still has a point of view, and the identity holds from a hand at a conference to a committee's screen. Hiring committees Google every finalist. When they Google her, the card in their pocket matches what they find.