For a long time my portfolio was a showcase — hero particles, marquees, tilt cards, the works. It was fun to build and exhausting to look at. When I sat down to rebuild it, I wrote a single rule at the top of the doc: motion has to serve reading, or it has to go.
That killed most of what was there. The Three.js scene shrank to a single quiet wireframe. The typewriter slowed to one cycle. The parallax orbs got replaced by a thin horizontal rule that draws in on section enter. The result is calmer, but the site now feels like it has taste rather than energy.
The biggest lesson: whitespace is a design token. I added an 8pt spacing scale to the CSS and forced every section to use it. Suddenly the site read the way I wanted — like an object, not a demo.