Changelog

This site is the work, not just the container for it. Every release since the first deploy is logged here — what shipped, what broke, and what I fixed.

43 releases

Currently on v4.38

Updated Oct 2026

Recruiter FAQ: role

The recruiter FAQ answers whether Chevis is a product designer or a design engineer.

Contact verification recovery

The contact form keeps verification and delivery feedback in sync when a challenge refreshes.

Project scoper in action

The Aethr Design case study shows the aethrdesign.com project scoper answering a sample brief.

Aethr Design name

Aethr Design is now written as two words across the site and the résumé.

aethrdesign.com in code

The Aethr Design case study covers the move of aethrdesign.com from Framer to code, live in five days.
New section on the site's project scoper, its record checks and the embedded client portal.

Sharper Treevah timeline

The Treevah layout timeline opens in image detail, sharp enough to read every frame.
The résumé reflects the latest Treevah, Solara and Entagile case-study details.

Credits and labels

The typography essay, the colophon and the lab describe the portfolios that inspired this site.
The Solara marketing study's headline numbers sit under Impact again.
Both Solara studies name PyData Paris 2024 and link the talk that used the slide deck I built.

Clearer image inspection

Detailed architecture and handoff images have a clear enlargement button.
Image detail opens with the whole image fitted to the window.
Hover previews show a wider area so details keep their context.
Solara’s architecture and Entagile’s handoff open with sharper detail.
Early Solara logo and palette explorations are available as supporting detail.
The nav wordmark’s wave appears after a long hover.

Clearer case studies and essays

Every case study opens with its results, then follows the work in the order it happened.
The AethrDesign study centers on TasteLed and explains how the pipeline directs AI, with the agent skills and the Arca hero fix in expandable detail.
Treevah shows how the shared handoff cut a feature cycle from three weeks to two.
The Solara marketing study tells the rim-of-light story behind its motion design.
The Entagile study covers the trust problem, the stakeholder interviews and the homepage structure in more depth.
The essays on AI and taste, Claude Code and Cursor, and the move from Framer to code each argue a clear position.
Essays have short, permanent addresses; older links still work.

More of the work behind the essays

The portfolio essay shows the current home page and its persistent navigation.
The client-portal essay shows the Notion page that preceded the shared engagement record.
The verification essay shows image placeholders filling the home-page work cards.

Clearer search and AI discovery

Search previews describe the current role and connect each study and essay to its author profile.
AI readers can find the public résumé, background and FAQ from the site index.
Case-study previews carry their latest update and image.
Shared links to case studies and essays carry a preview card sized for LinkedIn and chat apps.

Smoother expanding sections

Detail sections and the contact form grow and shrink smoothly instead of pushing the page.
A detail section's bottom border travels with its contents as it unfolds and closes.
Detail sections keep their header in place when collapsed and respond smoothly to repeated toggles.
A detail section's edges take the study's color on hover.

Wider reading, research documents

Case-study and essay paragraphs run wider, closer to the width of the images beside them.
About paragraphs on the home and About pages span their full column.
The GMU study shows four M.A. documents as covers that open the full text.
The SUSTech study includes the cover of the submitted thesis.
Detail sections name the part of the study they expand, show a clear end, and fold back to where you were reading.
Hovering a detail section draws its edges in the study's own color.

Larger, easier reading

Body text is larger on every page, on laptops and phones alike.
Paragraphs wrap at a comfortable reading width instead of running the full column.
Captions, card summaries and experience notes step up in size too.
Contact form fields no longer zoom the page when tapped on an iPhone.
The GMU accessibility pilot and SUSTech capstone studies now lead with what each experiment revealed.
Optional detail sections preview what they hold, and their header stays in reach while open.

Treevah, from first layout to alpha

The Treevah study traces its navigation from the layout I inherited to the tabbed three-pane the alpha shipped with.
A dated timeline shows all six Treevah layouts at once.
Treevah's validation section walks through one test round, step by step.
Image backdrops on every case study now share the hue of that study's theme color.
Expandable detail rows open with a soft fade and keep the page's section spacing.

Shorter, sharper stories

All seven case studies rewritten to lead with each decision and the reasoning behind it.
Methods, specs and source threads now sit in expandable sections, so each study reads faster.
The AethrDesign study gains a large-preview gallery of selected client sites.
All ten essays rewritten, with titles that state each argument.
Expandable detail sections now work inside essays too.

Steady comparison controls

Comparison sliders hold their position when switching between arrow keys, Home, End and dragging.
HTML and Markdown use separate, stable URLs.

Evidence you can retrieve and cite

Case studies and essays now offer complete Markdown versions.
Research reports and presentations open directly from shared links.
Recruiter answers now support links to individual questions.

Shareable, readable, current

Every page now shares with its own title, summary and preview card.
The FAQ reads the case studies, essays and work history directly, so it stays current as the work does.
Feed readers can subscribe from any page on the site, not just the writing index.
Search engines and AI assistants can reach the changelog, style guide and FAQ by following links.
Headings step one level at a time on every page, which is what screen readers and outline tools follow.
Case study and essay titles re-cut so the set reads as separate pieces, not one shape repeated.

The tool split

New essay: The tool I was an expert in couldn't be automated.
It covers the one tier of the practice that moved from Framer to code, and the one that stayed on the canvas on purpose.
The two essays about running the practice now link to each other.

Type and contents

Case studies have a chaptered table of contents: sections nest under the part of the story they belong to.
The changelog and style guide got the same contents panel, and the section you're in is marked in the page's own colour.
Every line where two typefaces meet now sets at one letter-spacing.
Captions, list items and small labels space the same as the copy beside them.
Impact numbers re-cut for the size they actually render at, not the size they used to be.
The changelog's version and date travel down the page beside their own release.
Release notes are shorter here, and stick to what shipped.
The site hands search engines and AI assistants a plain map of how it's organised.

Two families

New typefaces: headlines and ledes are now Lyon, everything else is IBM Plex Sans.
Two families instead of three unrelated ones — one sets the voice, one does the work.
The lede went back to a serif, in the cut actually drawn for reading at that size.
Body copy stayed a sans on purpose: it sits beside interface screenshots, not in a magazine.
New essay: A typography rebuild — from five faces to two families.
A line on the home and about pages that says the job in one sentence: I build the system a product gets made with, then ship it in production React.
Maxematics is live at maxematics.org, and the study links the client's own domain.
An editing pass across every case study and essay.

Three faces, one voice

The type system went from five typefaces to three: a display serif, a label sans, a reading sans.
Headlines no longer change face mid-sentence — one voice per line, one emphasis at most.
Two retired faces left with it, and 145 KB of font files off the first paint.
The display and label faces are now two halves of one family, drawn on the same skeleton.
Code snippets in the writing set in the system monospace, rather than pulling in a fourth face.
The AethrDesign study now shows the delivery system instead of describing it: the file behind an engagement, next to the client page it renders into.
You can open that client portal yourself — a real one, frozen at the date the study describes.
The Entagile homepage shows as three columns side by side instead of one long scroll.
New Side projects section on the about page — the lab, and the tools this site is built out of.

A seat on someone else's team

The AethrDesign study makes a different argument: the leverage doesn't replace a team, it travels.
New section — the work at Arca Wealth, an ongoing design-engineering seat on their growth pod.
Their board, their ticket, their Slack thread: three exhibits from inside someone else's org.
The About timeline names it too.

The capstone that started the pivot

New case study: a 2021 cognition experiment, built in MATLAB and submitted to an electrical engineering department.
It ships with two documents in English — a method-and-findings paper and a programming walkthrough deck.
The SUSTech row on /about now opens the study instead of leaving the site.
Hosted PDFs open in the in-page viewer again; they had been rendering blank.
PowerPoint previews resize with the window, so a whole slide fits at any width.
The style guide's colour swatches read straight from the stylesheet, so the page can't drift from the code.

The résumé lives here now

The Résumé link serves the current PDF from this site.
cheviszhou.com/resume is a permanent address — the PDF behind it can be updated without breaking a link already sent.

Experience on /about

New Experience timeline — six eras of work history, newest first, with what each company actually was.
Companies with a case study link straight to it.
The 2021–2023 internships ship as one banded era, the way they happened — three back-to-back internships through the Human Factors master's.
Added the 2016–2021 undergraduate entry: a MATLAB PsychToolBox cognition experiment submitted to an electrical engineering department.
Link to the full résumé at the foot of the section.
Every page points search engines at its one canonical address.
Keyboard focus outlines hold their contrast on every accent colour.
Every page carries its preview image and site name when shared.

The Treevah study

New case study: Treevah — cloud file-manager navigation and the design operation that scaled it.
Two movements on one page: the product decisions that settled depth and selection, then the design system and operating model that shipped them.
Carousels, lineage stills, and a recorded interaction video from the Cloud Alpha work.

The AethrDesign study

New case study: AethrDesign, my AI-native design practice.
Client deliverables run live inside the page — the Rets AI animation set plays through its own runtime. Click a card to pause it.
The planning graph the study was built on is on the page too, and you can hover it to read every decision.

Faster images, label fixes

Case-study images now show a preview while they load, instead of an empty frame.
Images load faster on a first visit — the heaviest studies no longer lag behind a fast scroll.
Fixed overlapping Before/After and Light/Dark labels on drag-comparison images.
Fixed a case-study detail note that was rendering twice.

The avatar waves back

Hovering my avatar now raises a hand — a small wave on the home page, a friendlier one on About.
Replaced the click-to-play intro video on the About page.

Colophon popover

The footer's build-stack details moved into a small popover behind the word Colophon.

Skills map

New lab page: an Obsidian-style graph of all 56 agent skills behind this site.
The map traces each skill from where it's authored or licensed to every AI runtime that executes it.
Hovering a node lights up its neighborhood, the way a vault graph does.

Writing, sorted

New essay: I stopped typing code. I started directing it.
Essays are now grouped by topic — Process, Craft, Tools.
Rebuilt the writing index so each topic labels its own group down the left margin.
Essay summaries wrap at a readable line length instead of running the full width.

Materials, RSS, and this page

This changelog.
Case studies host their own PDFs, decks, and papers — they preview in the browser instead of downloading.
Paper covers are clickable.
Added an RSS feed for the writing.

Case-study craft pass

Links inside a section no longer outrank that section's own header.
Case-study metadata moves next to the section it describes.
Paper covers get a printed-page lift — soft shadow, hairline edge.
Added local editing tools: right-click a screenshot in development to swap or re-caption it.

Site-wide audit

Every claim on the site now traces to a source record, and the record is the one the case studies are written from.
Entagile gained a before/after homepage comparison.
Two new essays.
Screenshots can sit in a browser frame — a real Safari toolbar, drawn rather than screenshotted.
Added a skip-to-content link and a styled 404.

Nebula V2

The Lab graph restructures around meaning, not folders: six life domains at the core, tools in an outer ring.
Selecting a node lights its whole ancestry and the tools that touch it.
New activity panel — sessions, messages, tokens, 26-week heatmap.
Fixed the background haze: the renderer was skipping a color-space conversion and lifting the blacks.

Lab ships

/lab is now CHEVIS.OS — a 3D map of the AI system I actually run: a 385-concept knowledge graph plus the skills, scripts, and projects wired into it.
Built from a real snapshot of my machine. None of it is mock data.
Boot sequence, magnetic cursor, click-to-focus drilldown.
Collapses to one scrollable stack on phones; honors reduced-motion.

Writing ships

/writing goes live with the first essay, on how this portfolio was built.
Open Graph cards, sitemap, robots.txt — all derived from the content, so new work is included automatically.
Separated the two Solara studies: distinct openings, no shared metrics.
Raised the minimum type sizes on small screens.

Solara case studies

Both Solara case studies land.
Text selection picks up each study's own accent colour.
Cut the heading scale down a step to restore the gap under the hero.

About and contact

Added the about page and a working contact form.
Content updates across the case studies.

Initial deploy

First deploy. Case studies in MDX, a fluid type and spacing system, video and Lottie players.
Drew inspiration from a range of portfolios — the type system owes the most to Kyle Conrad's.