Triggersandsparks.com Time Capsule

Client: Self-Directed/School Projects

I've learned that the pickiest and most demanding client I'll ever have to deal with is myself. I work myself well into the night and am almost never satisfied -- which might explain the excessive number of redesigns this site has undergone since its inception. Luckily, as I get busier and busier, it becomes more difficult to undergo a redesign, so I've slowed the pace considerably.

The Checkerboard One

This was my first portfolio site, which was very simple and contained text within a sort of checkerboard pattern, which I still think is neat, if highly impractical. Designs are like shoes -- I very rarely want to buy a sneaker, but I always complain when my feet have blisters.

The Flash One

I've never been an advocate of Flash websites. From a designer's point of view, they're a godsend -- taking away all the worries and problems of designing for all sorts of badly written browsers and platforms -- but they're cheating, and they're bad form, and I know whenever I'm given the choice between Flash and not-Flash, I take the not-Flash. So this was my first, and only, Flash-based portfolio website.

The Dull Grey One

This was actually a series of skinned layouts that appeared at random or were user-selected. They were also my first foray into the brave new world of standards-compliant CSS design, so each was carefully wooed into proper functionality in every browser. The weekend involved much crying and much screaming.

The Wild West One

I've had a long-standing infatuation with distressed looks, Old-West-style fonts, curlicues and flourishes, and colour schemes that combine chocolate brown with sky (not baby!) blue. My bookshelves are painted with this colour scheme, then artificially distressed.

The One With Trees

My favourite skin for quite some time. Unfortunately, the tree photo really had no bearing on the site's contents, and just being pretty wasn't, in this case, enough to cut it. I decided, after making this design, that red and yellow superimposed over black and white photos is going to be my signature. If nothing else, it at least makes for good logo colours!

The Rounded-Off One

This is the point at which I broke down, got rid of the skins, and designed by website for every single browser I could lay my hands on. Which took a bit of fighting, but taught me a LOT about what I can and can't do while still retaining web accessibility, along with a few tricks to help everything act the way it's supposed to. I also finally added text to every portfolio item, which I'd formerly been against, thinking the work ought to stand on its own without any supporting documentation. I loved this layout and kept it up for a good long while (comparitively) until the colour palette started to get to me.

The One With the Arabesques

This layout taught me that I am my own worst client. I agonized over every font size and every pixel, spending an entire long weekend ironing everything out until I was happy with it. The background pattern is an arabesque I created in Illustrator and the flourish belongs to a library of such I'm slowly building up. I think this layout is probably the best yet, in terms of being simple and transparent enough to allow the content to be the most visible aspect of the website.

The One You're Looking At

This layout represents a logo redesign, two redesigns that never quite made it to fruition, a total restructuring of the content, and me trying to teach myself Ruby on Rails. I've been working on it so long, I can't even tell if I like it anymore, but I hope it does a better job of showing the sort of work I'm capable of doing.