What I Am Doing

I recently threw my web site out the window for one with no navigation, no portfolio (odd for a designer, yes?) and no info about myself at all. This begs the question of just what the heck I’m doing. I shall do my best to elaborate.

On Design

I decided to create a unique design for each post. Part of me was hesitant to do this because Smashing Magazine—who I am beginning to think I should avoid like the plague, save a few nice articles on CSS3—recently published a post about this approach and called it creating a Blogazine. I don’t like to think of this as climbing aboard the Blogazine trend train; I rather like to think of it as challenging myself in new ways that I personally need to be challenged. Designing a blog that does not have a new design per post is by no means lazy or simple. The “traditional” blog post will not die, so long as people continue to share great ideas. The thing that is more likely to kill the blog post moreso than blogazines is boring, useless content, plain and simple. If you want an example of how much work and expertise can go into the so-called “traditional” blog, just take a look at Mark Boulton’s Blog and drool over its beauty and effectiveness.

Ah, that feels better now. Anyway, I just want to challenge myself and push myself into new directions. In my day job, I tend to work with the same kind of web sites (the same subject matter) over and over. By pursuing a new design with each blog, I can really encourage myself to stay sharp and to pursue a sound concept and execution with each design. Because design is not about icons or Photoshop or some new CSS trick, it’s about solving problems and communicating ideas. The thing that some of these glossy posts out there miss, is thinking. I shall continue to push myself to cleave to this ideal, and to try to master it more each day.

On Content

This is the stuff you need to make people come to your site and stay there. I have never posted blog entries consistently. And I mean never. I find that by approaching each blog post as a project unto itself, I have more energy and motivation to create, and to create something worthwhile at that. I keep slapping notes into the excellent Evernote on a regular basis with ideas upon ideas for blog posts. It’s a place I haven’t been in before, and I’m loving it.

On the Future

Yet another thing I’m challenging myself to do with this version of my site is to design everything in the browser. So long static comps, hello Real World. You just can’t format text in Photoshop and the web the same way. I also am letting go of control with my CSS. This site will not look exactly the same in every browser. It’s just not how the web works, and it’s time to embrace it, people of the world. My site will not look the same in Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 6-8. That being said, Safari 4 will probably always be the way to see all the bells and whistles, quite simply because Webkit freaking rocks. As other browsers catch up, you’ll see everything in more browsers.

That being said, I arrive at the future. This site will improve day to day, week to week, as I flesh out a table of contents, my bio, the navigation, etc. I fully plan to change things totally live and expose the whole process. This should be interesting, and I’m very excited about it. After all, I love this stuff.