I've wanted to redesign my old site since the day it was launched and have been working on this site ever since. Today I finally get to share it with everyone else.
I designed and built my last site for my portfolio show when I was graduating from college. It was what I refer to as "the-summer-of-no-love." 21 credit hours, raining all summer in Boston, stuck in my apartment updating old portfolio pieces and building a CMS by hand. But I wanted that site to be all me, and I got what I wanted. I hadn't yet found the value of an established content management system. I believe that site was the best that I could do at the time. Fortunately, I continued to learn and felt that my site could really benefit from a redesign.
A long time coming
This new site is meant to be partly a showcase of my design work and partly a place to stretch out my design muscles in an environment that promotes experimentation. I hope to keep the Notes section active on a somewhat regular basis. I'm going to narrow down the focus of the section to the topic of design but at the same time keep it loose enough to encompass related subjects that I might find interesting.
This site didn't happen overnight. It's been a long, grueling process. This has always mainly been a portfolio site, though with this new rendition I am transitioning it to focus more of the Notes section. In writing this post, I decided to go back and take a look at the sites that have come before this.
The most recent retired site design. (2009 - 2010)
This site lasted me through much of college. (2007 - 2009)
Created while in the Graphic Design program at Tri-C. Despite my embarrassing site design, the program was actually really great. (2005 - 2007)
As happy as I am that this site is finally complete, I have trouble letting go. So I've archived the previous versions of my site. I want to keep them online as a reminder to myself of how far I have come and where I am heading in my career.
I'm all about learning, all about advancing myself. I'm really looking forward to learning from the visitors of this site. Hopefully there will be a few inciteful discussions along the way. I'm on this journey of education just as everyone else is, let's all learn from each other.
The Great Transition
Over the past year, I've started to consider myself more of a designer than a coder and I feel much more comfortable in that role. I can see myself pursuing design into the future, whereas coding was more of a thing that I'm not too bad at and that can actually make me some money. Don't get me wrong, I still maintain and plan on keeping a heavy hand or at least a sharp eye on the front-end development world. It's something that interests me and is important to be aware of as a designer, but I don't get the same excitement starting a dev project as I do starting a design project.
For that reason, and after a conversation with Dan Mall, I've decided to remove all traces of development from my portfolio. One of his criticisms of my previous site was that I was spread too thin and it tough to tell exactly where I specialize. I've taken his advice and gone through and written case studies for each design project to shine some light on my design process.
This has drastically cut down the number of projects in my portfolio, but has upped the quality of each and I think that is what is really important. I will be adding a few more projects in there in the near future that are still under wraps.
That's all great, but what do I care?
You might be asking yourself "What does this have to do with me?" Well I've been working on this site since I moved to New York City in October and it's finally done! This has been THE BIG PROJECT I've been working on since then. I've had plenty of client work and other side projects, but this site has always been there, staring at me while I sleep, waiting to be finished.
So this is where you come in. I want to know, what has been THE BIG PROJECT for you? Do you have a project that you have had lying around for months that is just taking forever to finish? Is there a project that you recently launched that seemed to take forever to complete? Share with the class and hopefully you can inspire someone else to finally finish up that project they've been putting off for so long.