Thread.
This little redesign, as with most redesigns, has been a series of compromises. It started back in 2015, when the world was fresh and new, as an attempt to freshen up my long-neglected portfolio page. From there, I thought I’d try my hand at creating a proper professional website, with stories about client projects, stories of lessons learned from my practice, and so on. And then—then!—I realized I had two blogs I wasn’t updating, and wouldn’t it be great if an entire decade’s worth of writing suddenly lived on the same domain! I could export content from two different Ancient Blogging Content Management Systems, migrate it all into Jekyll, and have one glorious, unified archive of everything I’d ever written online! Think of the many-splendored exhaustiveness of it all!
You may have noticed that precisely none of this happened. This website lurched from scope spiral to scope spiral, expanding in size while never getting any closer to launch. And in fact, over the summer, work stopped altogether. For various reasons—I got busy; I had to grieve; I had to enjoy the sunshine—I didn’t keep up with this once-tiny project. Just had a bit too much going on.
Then, in November, a lot more happened.
How’s that old saying go? “When the world’s on fire, and the fascists are at your door, stop waffling and just redesign your blog.”
Pretty sure it’s something like that. More or less.
I will say, everything that’s happened had one hell of a focusing effect. The scope quickly became a lot more manageable. Over-designed bits fell away, leaving only the over-designed bits you see before you; extraneous features suddenly and sharply revealed themselves as such; the whole project suddenly became much more modest and, eventually, real.
The one exception to that winnowing-down was, surprisingly, the sprawling content migration. I managed to get a decade’s worth of writing into Jekyll pretty handily, and everything was continuing apace until, well, I started reading some of my old entries. Most of it hadn’t aged well and, frankly, a lot of it wasn’t great. (I wrote a lot of silly, dumb words in my twenties, is the main thing here.) Faced with that, I decided to select a handful of articles I’m especially proud of, and toss them into the Writing section. The old blogs are still where they used to be—I’m considering them under content quarantine—but I’m hoping new, good things will continue to be published here.
And for what it is, I couldn’t be happier with this (admittedly understated) design. If your browser’s able to see them, the words are set in Klim Type’s Tiempos Text; the wordmark, in Klim’s Founders Grotesk. (Folks, I really love Klim Type.) And I got to tinker with a few responsive-y tricks I’d been meaning to put to good use—nothing too flashy, mind, but I’m glad to have them in place.
Working on this redesign became something of a respite from, well, [gestures disgustedly at everything]. And now that the new site’s live, I realize I’d like to keep working on it. I’m not just feeling excited to see where it goes from here: as modest as it is, I’ve made something I’m proud of.
And after the last month, despite and with everything else, that felt a bit—just a very, very, very little bit—like hope.
I’m glad you’re here. As always, thanks for reading.