the straight way

North

The sky has no north on purpose: you are meant to drift, and drifting is the honest way to meet someone. But it takes twenty minutes. This is the road for when you have three. The sky is still there afterwards.

two to three minutes, measured · four stops · nothing withheld

1. room 009 · the person

   I am early, and I would rather say so

   I'm Purva, a student in India. I keep notebooks the way other people keep plants: too many, unevenly watered, each one alive in its own way. I don't have a title yet. The honest description is: I'm early.

   Two things about me that are both true. I believe careful research is a way of respecting the work, and I have also used research to hide from it. I won't resolve them into something tidier, because that tension is the most accurate description of me I have. Hire me and you hire the tension along with its output.

2. room 002 · things I made

   The work is this house itself

   Plain HTML, hand-written CSS, one small script. Under 100 KB, no trackers, no framework. It organises itself by a personal taxonomy, refuses templates, and keeps its errors on a public page. Alive, and expected to change.

   The most honest thing I can tell you about it is that making it nearly became a way of not making it. I generated a hundred concepts, audited them three times, and built a six-hundred-principle design genome, all before writing a single page. Some of that was rigour. Some of it was fear with a bibliography.

3. room 008 · errata & the drawer

   The one that died of cleverness

   Before this house there was another: a choose-your-own-adventure portfolio where the visitor played the recruiter. Dark pages, gold ink, branching paths, 648 lines in a single file. It is in the drawer now, not the shredder.

   It died of cleverness. It performed for the visitor instead of letting them meet me: it impressed people without introducing anyone. Old books printed their corrections on a page called errata. Websites quietly overwrite themselves instead. This one keeps the old habit.

4. room 010 · take something

   Now take something, whether or not you write back

   Most portfolios ask for your attention. This page pays for it. The whole stack this site was built on, every tool free, none of it behind an email field.

   type

   Fontshare, or system fonts for zero bytes. Pair with Fontjoy, scale with Typescale.

   colour

   Coolors or Khroma to explore, PaletteChecker to verify contrast and colourblindness.

   icons & illustration

   Lucide, or Eva Icons if you'd rather not look like everyone's defaults. unDraw, Hero Patterns, Haikei.

   images

   Unsplash, then compress everything through Squoosh before it touches your site.

   motion

   GSAP is fully free now, ScrollTrigger included. For gentler needs, CSS and one IntersectionObserver are enough: that is all this page uses.

   design tool

   Penpot. Open source, browser-based, no seat limits.

   ship it

   Cloudflare Pages, unlimited bandwidth free. Audit with axe DevTools and Lighthouse before you tell anyone.

That was the road. There is more house than this: eleven rooms, and the ones you did not pass are the ones I'd have shown you with more time. The sky is back through the door, and it still has no north.