An unsolicited portfolio review featuring digital design director, Andrea Campesato Segnini

Welcome to our new series on DESK, where break down the details behind great portfolios.

You can call them reviews, but we’ll mostly be examining the successful elements of these websites. It’s easy to be a critic, but we’re more interested in understanding the small decisions that amount to a strong portfolio. And with the talent in our Semplice Showcase and Carbonmade talent pool, it’s easy to find strong portfolios.

To start, we’re looking at this week’s Semplice Showcase feature: Andrea Campesato Segnini.

While I do wish Andrea offered a bit more insight into his work within his case studies, there's a lot I enjoy about the design and build of this portfolio. Let’s dive in.

Andrea uses the Advanced Portfolio Grid on his homepage to present his work. Crisp, full-screen images appear while hovering project names. It works beautifully with his projects because the image quality is so high.

Note: Andrea didn't necessarily capture these photos, but he designed and art directed the projects they appear in. Unless you agreed otherwise, you're entitled to do the same. Use every resource available to you.

The custom cursor is also a nice touch here. Paired with the minimalist navigation and typeface, it adds personality without being distracting or intrusive. I always look for the little personal moments like this – a custom cursor or favicon, a special hover effect or design detail in the footer. It's the tiny, almost missable details that show you're paying attention, which says a lot about the kind of work you do.

Subtle animations on Andrea’s About page create subtle depth. It may be tempting to do something wild with page animations, and sometimes that works well. But in this case, text softly floating in on scroll fits the mood perfectly.

With the Semplice custom animations feature, this takes literally a few minutes to do. You can even set up site-wide animations that apply to all your body copy or headlines, for example. A few clicks and your whole site feels more elegant and interactive.

But my favorite part of this portfolio may be the Lab page. Call it Lab, call it Experiments, call it Play, whatever you like. But these pages are always a treat, full of explorations and side projects that show us who you are and what you're into. Andrea's page reveals his love of album art and print design.

To see more beautiful portfolios (if you can’t wait for next week’s review), visit the Semplice Showcase. We handpick two new portfolios to feature each week, and sometimes just scrolling the page gets me in the mood to create.

All images in this article were taken from Andrea Campesato Segnini's portfolio, built with Semplice. The article cover image appears in his "Boom!" project.