When I decided to renew burcakcinar.com under the BC Art & Design identity, the easiest design decision would have been to replace everything. New grid. New menu. New animation language. New portfolio template. It would have been cleaner, faster and much more predictable.
I chose not to do that, because the orbit navigation was the part of the old site I could still recognise with my eyes closed.
A menu can become part of a project's memory
The orbit is not the most conventional way to navigate a portfolio. That is precisely why it survived. The icons circle a creative centre and lead into different parts of my practice: work, music, the Fan Club, game experiments, the story behind the work, showreel, contact and the journal.
Over the years my work became increasingly multidisciplinary, and the orbit accidentally became a useful metaphor for it. Design, code, photography, motion, games and brand work are not separate careers to me. They move around the same centre and influence one another.
Replacing that structure with a standard top navigation would have made the site easier to categorise, but also easier to forget.
The old idea had to survive modern conditions
Preserving a visual behaviour is different from preserving old technical assumptions. The site still carries parts of its earlier JavaScript and Raphaël.js heritage, but the environment around it has changed dramatically. Visitors now arrive on phones with very different viewport sizes, rotate screens, resize browsers, use touch input and expect interfaces to remain stable while live services load in the background.
So the redesign became less about drawing a new orbit and more about teaching the existing idea how to live in a newer world.
The orbit was made responsive. A fallback navigation was added so the menu still has a usable path when the primary rendered interface is unavailable. The centre branding was rebuilt around the BC Art & Design identity. The surrounding sections were modernised without forcing the homepage to stop being itself.
New systems entered an old universe
The most satisfying part of the project was connecting modern services to an interaction that existed before those services were part of the plan.
The Work section now receives current portfolio content through Instagram. The Fan Club combines live X data with the original friend-list idea and presents thousands of profiles in manageable interactive groups. The Showreel uses YouTube, Music connects to SoundCloud, and the Blog now opens a separate SEO-friendly journal designed for long-form reading.
That combination is exactly what I wanted from the redesign: not nostalgia preserved in glass, but nostalgia allowed to evolve.
I did remove things—just not the character
Respecting an old design does not mean refusing to edit it. Some old browser techniques had to go. Legacy interaction assumptions were replaced. Mobile behaviour needed additional safeguards. Data-heavy sections needed server-side caching and persistent snapshots. Failure states needed to be considered because a live API can decide to have a bad day without consulting the art direction.
The important question was always the same: is this change removing technical debt, or is it removing personality?
I was happy to remove the first. I was much more suspicious of the second.
A redesign does not have to pretend the past never happened
There is a popular idea that a redesign should look dramatically different so everyone can immediately see that work has been done. Sometimes that is necessary. Sometimes the old structure is genuinely the problem.
But there are also projects where the strongest decision is translation rather than replacement. Keep the behaviour people remember. Rebuild the layers that have aged. Improve access, performance, content and resilience. Let the project show that it has a history instead of forcing it to behave like it was invented yesterday.
That is what the orbit means to me now. It is not only a navigation device. It is evidence that a digital idea can survive several technical eras if its central metaphor remains useful.
The site changed. The brand changed. APIs arrived. Mobile behaviour became a serious design problem. SEO became more structured. The portfolio became a live system instead of a static archive.
And the menu is still going around in circles.
For once, that is a compliment.
What I protected in the final redesign
During the rebuild I kept asking whether a visitor familiar with the old site would still recognise its personality. The answer did not depend on preserving every line of code or every visual detail. It depended on preserving the relationship between the central identity and the orbiting disciplines, the sense that navigation itself is part of the work rather than a neutral layer placed above it.
That became a practical test for every change. When a technical revision improved stability, mobile behaviour or accessibility without changing that relationship, it was welcome. When a proposed simplification made the site more conventional but less specific, I treated the convenience with suspicion. A personal portfolio has a different responsibility from a banking interface; it is allowed to reveal how its creator thinks, provided the visitor can still find a reliable path through it.
The final site therefore carries visible history without pretending the history is technically perfect. I prefer that honesty. A redesign can demonstrate judgement by deciding what deserves to survive. In this case the orbit was not technical debt to erase; it was creative equity. The work was rebuilding everything around it so that the memory could continue operating in a modern environment.