madinagoodway.com
Personal project – portfolio website
The website you are browsing right now was a true labour of love from start to finish. A home for my work, built for two audiences: New Zealand and Finland. I am a proud Finn after all, and a dual citizen, so I wanted to bring this duality into my approach.
NZ is where I have lived and thrived since 2004. For my Finnish clients, I am their creative ‘nightshifter’, and the live clocks in the header are a reminder of this handy time zone advantage. Finnish visitors get key content in their own language, and I also added some familiar, iconic touches to the interactive tiles. Have you ever tasted ‘turkinpippuri’ salty liquorice? Love it or loathe it?
I wanted the site to feel purpose-built, not generic or generated. I crafted things by hand: I photographed items from my own home, right down to my morning cup of coffee, drips and all, and created the illustrations myself, with no AI shortcuts.
My most interesting task was giving audio its own space on the website – sound is much harder to show visually. In the end, it all came together naturally, because sound runs through my life story: deejaying, radio, community dance hours with non-stop music mixes, and now voice work (officially, and overdue)! You’ll find plenty of links to the places I hang out online.
In the spirit of transparency: I used AI to draft much of the baseline copy for the portfolio pages, based on my own copy briefs, and Claude Code was my developer. That ‘labour of love’ applies here too. Every stage meant detailed testing, whack-a-moling issues, reprompting, and checking again and again. But we got there in the end, and I deployed the site myself. I learnt so much along the way.
MY ROLE
Concept, design, imagery, QA