MALAJ DESIGN

The Idea

Andi's work lived on Instagram, TikTok and in PDFs: good for reach, poor for a client who wants to see a full identity system in one place. He needed a home for it, a site that looks like a designer made it, loads fast enough for the images to land immediately, and can be found by people searching for a graphic designer in Prishtina.

What I Built

Andi designed the website; I turned his design into a working site. It has a homepage with selected work, a full work index, a page for every project with previous and next navigation, About, Services and Contact pages, and a downloadable brand book. Contact is one tap away by email, with the subject already filled in, or by phone.

• Selected work on the homepage
• Work index with twelve projects
• Individual project pages
• Previous and next project navigation
• Downloadable PDF brand book
• About and Services pages
• One-tap email and phone contact
• Smooth page transitions
• Scroll reveal animations
• Skip-to-content link

User Experience

A visitor should understand who Andi is in one line and see real work within one scroll. Each project card gives the short version, and the project page goes further, with a counter showing where you are among the twelve and links to move straight to the next one. Every page ends with the same question, "Have a project in mind?", so the way to hire him is never more than a scroll away.

Design Decisions

The visual design is Andi's: a white canvas, large confident headlines, small mono labels and a single blue for actions, so the color in the projects is the only color that competes for attention. My job was to keep that restraint intact in code: matching his type scale and spacing, keeping images in fixed proportions so the grid never jumps while loading, and making the layout hold from a phone to a wide screen.

Technical Approach

Built with Next.js on the App Router and React, bundled with Turbopack and styled with Tailwind CSS. The site is exported as static HTML, so there is no server to run and every page is ready the moment it is requested. Fonts (Geist, Geist Mono and Instrument Serif) are self-hosted through next/font, the first project images are preloaded, the rest load lazily, and page changes use the View Transitions API. Scroll animations respect the visitor's reduced motion setting.

• Next.js (App Router)
• React
• Turbopack
• Tailwind CSS
• next/font
• Static export
• View Transitions API
• IntersectionObserver
• JSON-LD structured data
• XML image sitemap

SEO Perspective

A portfolio is mostly images, which search engines cannot read, so the structure has to do the talking. Every page has its own title, description, canonical URL and social preview image. Structured data describes Andi as a Person, the site as a WebSite, the homepage selection as an ItemList, and each project as a VisualArtwork. The sitemap includes the cover image of every project, so the work can surface in image search, and the copy names what he does and where: a graphic designer in Prishtina, Kosovo.

What I Learned

Building someone else's design is a different discipline from designing your own. When a detail was hard to build, the easy answer was to change it; the right answer was usually to ask Andi why it was there and find a way to keep it. Working with a designer also changed how I think about performance: on a portfolio, a slow image is not a technical problem, it is a worse first impression of the work.

Andi Malaj

Andi Malaj is a graphic designer based in Prishtina, with a degree in Integrated Design from UBT. He works on brand identity, logos, posters, typography, packaging, mascots and cover art, from a municipal identity for Kamenica to streetwear, travel and technology brands. If you need a logo, a full visual identity or design for print and digital, take a look at his work and get in touch with him directly.