what website design does to me
to be honest, all you need to know about my relationship with modern web design is summarized above, but for the sake of it, I will go ahead and give a timeline on all the events that lead up to my website which I am pretty proud of right now, honestly!
the journey
Spring of 2023
aka the creation of my first portfolio online
- Around this time, I was at the point in my life where I wanted to switch jobs. Unfortunately, being someone who specializes in not just static design work but also motion, I quickly found that pdf interactivity is not worth the hassle.
- Instead, having a website was the only logical solution here… So, on a long weekend in the spring of that year, I sat and doubled down on making a website.
- I started off on the Wix platform and wanted to pull my hair out, so looking at the very many alternatives and feeling the paralysis of decisions close in on me, I made the switch to EditorX (currently known as Wix Studio)
- While that was better than just the base Wix, I still couldn’t get many things to work like I wanted.
Goodbye, I am off to Another Planet …
- Anyways, my time with Wix prompted me to even eventually write a whole video script, but it never actually got past me filming it, because, it was just a whole lot of venting. Maybe I’ll get back here someday again if I feel like it.
- Basically, I managed to get through it, landed a new job, forgot about it! (this website is no longer on the web, but nevertheless it was always just on a free ugly domain and only really accessed if I directly linked to it etc.)
Winter of 2023-2024
aka getting acquainted with Figma
- Another thing I did in 2023 aside from switching jobs was also enrolling in a year long study program at [LABASAD](experience at LABASAD). As I felt I wanted a little bit of formal education on graphic design on top of my work experience and professional degree in print production design.
- One of the modules there was website design (which I dreaded.) and the “mini” assignment of the module was to create a mockup of your own portfolio site in Figma to get more acquainted with the software.
- In the end, I spent more time with the portfolio “mini” assignment than my final work for the module, but while Auto Layout was a hellish thing to learn, and planning everything out was, too, at least on Figma it was just a mockup (although, the mapping of pages for the effect of filters for my works page was a major pain.)
- If my time with Wix got me frustrated with responsive design, my experience with Figma just further cemented the frustration. Responsive design is a cool tech, I can’t lie, but god dammit I miss when I was a kid and I could just screw around in some basic html and css while using a custom website platform like ucoz and not have to worry about how things will look on phones and tablets!!!
- With the mockup behind me, and having learned the principles of web design in more detail which, was interesting enough, I suppose, of course many of my coursemates had been intrigued by actually making these mockups we all made realized on the web.
- But at the time, it wasn’t a priority for me. I just was happy I’d made a somewhat nice looking mockup from scratch and I never wanted to think about it ever again. But it was good to know it was there, just in case!
Late 2024 / Early 2025
aka ‘i think it would be cool to finally realize that mockup after all’
At some point while I was going through The Artist’s Way in 2024 (really nice book for all kinds of creatives btw!) a big thing that kept coming back to me time and time again as I was doing the exercises in the book was my dream of being a book designer. Which eventually lead me to musing about having a space to showcase my work, which then lead to…
and somehow lizz went and took it as a challenge … (read their retro on that whole thing here)
It took a few more months for us to finally double down, but by December 2024, we actually Committed to it.
- Even though I had the mockup ready, there was a lot of work still to be done (mainly, actually updating the work list and making sure I have material to present, every creative’s favorite part of creating portfolios, of course)
- So, having a full time job and doing this more for the enrichment of my own dreams that aren’t 100% related to the usual career things, my progress on the realization was sort of slow
- Thankfully, most of the things that I had to change in the mockup I only had to change the desktop version of, as I immediately told lizz I would NOT bother with the tablet and mobile mockups anymore (responsive design my enemy) and I’d just leave it to them to interpret the design in their own way for those.
- By mid-February I’d finished up all my project assets. The biggest roadblock was actually my most recent project, Xenoblade Compendium, as due to shipping issues I didn’t get my copy until much much later than anyone else. (very sad)
- And then, now in March, came the final finishing touches!
extra notes on the design of the site…?
Honestly, I don’t have much to talk about in terms of the design. Maybe other than the fact that it was really amusing for me to keep telling lizz to refer to the mockup on Figma to see my vision and them missing some really obvious (to me) parts of it. And just generally having a fun time with my good friend and watching the design come alive!
websites as the natural enemy of the editorial designer
Oh, though, fun thing for me specifically as an editorial designer is that I am VERY keenly aware of text formatting quirks, such as orphans and general ugly paragraph visuals.
This, made me hate responsive design as thing EVEN more. I just really hate it, man.
Watching the paragraphs of text on my site just be so utterly modular and always changing is something I still really hate to see even now on the live website, as a result. In some places, I asked there to be non-breaking spaces, but that still doesn’t solve the fact that on some widths some paragraphs are just Hella Ugly.
accessibility things
Also, I know that some of the color palette quirks on the website break the accessibility contrast rules and what not…. but let me have something to have fun with, okay?!
the unexpected things i enjoyed
- optimization!
- finding a web hosting solution to save money!
- github…. so cool.