A one-day, hands-on workshop where you create your own custom portfolio site. No templates, no AI slop, no subscriptions.
The stack we'll be building with
A custom-coded portfolio mini-website with Cursor that acts as your first entry into designing and building directly with code, resulting in a stack you control.
You leave owning the code and the content, with a workflow you can run again on additional portfolio pages or any other project after the day ends. Gain the confidence to ship without waiting for a template, a plugin, or an engineer.
Product Designers who are comfortable in Figma and want to explore end-to-end building instead of renting a template. Junior Designers on the job hunt and Senior Designers who want a site they fully control.
You don't need to be a developer. A good part of the day is technical and I’ll walk you through all of it. If you can find your way around Figma and you know what good looks like, you have what you need.
Copywriting, images, case study material, whatever should live on the site.
If you have an existing portfolio on Webflow, Framer, or Squarespace, ensure you have the login and we'll pull your content across.
If you want your site deployed to a custom domain, you'll need to buy your domain name beforehand and we'll configure DNS settings together.
Anything that points to how you want your site to feel: A moodboard, a few sites you love, a favourite accent color, a favorite typeface. The more you bring, the more your site will look like you.
A paid Cursor plan, installed and signed in before the day. In the future, you can use the free plan, but you'll hit limits fairly quickly.
You don't need to know how to code, but it's helpful to have some familiarity with the terminal and basic web development concepts. You can use Claude Code if you'd like, and although the interface might be slightly different, the principles are the same. I'll be teaching in Cursor.
This is a hands-on workshop so you'll need to have all of your tools and access ready. While I walk you through the process, you will be building your own site on your own machine.
One full day, two sessions, with a break for lunch.
9am–Noon: Set up the project, connect it to GitHub and Vercel, and ship a first “About Me” page so you know how to deploy and maintain the site yourself. Then lay the Astro foundation: the skeleton of the site, design tokens, and how components and pages fit together.
Noon–1pm: Step away, eat, and come back ready for the afternoon.
1pm–4pm: Translate your aesthetic into a design system using design tokens. Drop your content in and build the core pages: a homepage, and a reusable page template for projects and case studies. Then push it all live, set up a custom domain, and add a staging URL so you can keep iterating safely afterward.
I'm Josh, a senior product designer based in Sydney with about a decade of experience, mostly as the first or only designer at early-stage B2B SaaS startups.
This workshop came from my actual process of building. Tabba, a browser extension I built and shipped, came out of this exact workflow, and I gave a talk on it at a recent Cursor Sydney meetup. My own portfolio website runs on the same stack you'll use here, so you're learning the process I actually use, not a demo version of it.
One day to learn how to build a portfolio site that's actually yours