Pain to Power by Maruja is definitely one of my favorite albums of 2025 and an impressive debut album for a band that truly takes the post-rock label to a new level.

It’s so exciting to see new players in the scene! Can’t wait how this band will evolve.

Finally, to give the whole thing a finishing paper-texture touch, I added noise. I generated a monochrome noise PNG with transparency and applied it as a background image. With the opacity set to around 5% and a blending mode on top, it subtly reinforces that paper-like feel.

Scrolling down, we'll find the components. In this example, you can see a button (defined with the .btn class). It defines the common styles for all buttons. Then, additional classes like .btn-primary extend it for different button types.

Opening the components.css file, the first thing we find is a list of variables. Variables define the styles of each component.

Some even get their values from other variables (like colors), defined in theme.css.

I followed the same modular approach for JavaScript.

Even though my portfolio doesn’t rely much on it, you’ll still find a few structured files:

Let’s start with the CSS structure. The project is split in:
- base.css → foundational styles (e.g. containers, typography).
- components.css → component styles (e.g. buttons, badges).
- reset.css → ensures consistency across browsers.
- theme.css → defines the color palette and visual tokens.

And that's it! We've been able to dynamically adapt to user preferences and centralize all styles in one place: in the color styles for Figma and in the theme.css file for the code. This approach will help us quickly expand the rest of the portfolio and maintain a clean code base 🥳

Once these variables are applied element styles defined in other CSS files, it's time to check for dark mode. This will allow us to switch between the two sets we defined earlier. And it's done in JavaScript, in two steps: first, we get the color scheme. Then we wait for changes in it to occur.

Once these colors styles are configured in our design tool, we must do the same in the code. Using CSS variables, I translated each Figma style into a ready-to-use (and reuse) element. Then, I grouped them into two sets: one for light mode and one for dark mode.

This would be the start of my mini portfolio design system. After a phase of brainstorming and sketching, I began testing color compositions on some initial prototypes in Figma. Over time, these colors would end up being defined as styles in my file, thus centralizing these color definitions.

Albums I keep coming back to: Deafheaven - Infinite Granite (2021).

This band's turn towards a cleaner, #shoegaze style, without quite losing their roots, sounds dreamy, warm, ethereal. It's a truly beautiful listen.