A PhD candidate's
portfolio.

The idea.

The client is a sociology doctoral candidate at Emory whose work sits at the intersection of race, immigration, and diaspora. She needed an academic home on the web: somewhere to present her research, publications, teaching, and CV to advisors, hiring committees, and collaborators. It had to read as serious scholarship while still feeling like a person, not a CV in a PDF.

The design.

Direction: Editorial and botanical, light and airy. EB Garamond for the serif display voice, Inter for the body. A deep-blue primary (her favorite color) with a brighter blue accent, spring greens, and a warm cream background.

A personal motif: A delicate line-art sunflower, gold petals and a brown center on a green stem, threads through the hero, the dissertation feature, and the mobile views. It is a quiet personal signature woven into otherwise formal academic design, and a secondary gold accent ties it to the palette.

Structure: Hero, about, an education timeline, research areas as tag pills, a featured deep-blue card for her dissertation, publications, awards and fellowships, teaching and talks, and contact with a downloadable CV. Built in Figma on shared color variables, text styles, and paint styles, so type and palette changes cascade everywhere.

The build.

Hand-built static HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS, faithful to the Figma system, with subtle scroll and motion details that make it feel crafted rather than templated. Fully responsive with a clean mobile layout and a downloadable CV. Auto-deployed to Vercel from GitHub. Live at temi-portfolio.vercel.app.

Why this work.

Academic sites usually pick one of two failure modes: sterile, or amateur. The goal here was a third option, a portfolio that carries scholarly weight and still has a point of view. The sunflower motif is the proof that a serious project and a human touch are not mutually exclusive.