Easy As 1, 2, 3
Down time is not what I want it to be. It’s probably not what you want it to be either, dear reader mine. But push through we must!
In order to better establish myself and my goals with the webpage, I decided to delineate my next three focuses for the site. Yes, it is meant to be a portfolio site. That, of course, means it must be reflective of who I am. Which means that the current state just won’t do. The next three steps aren’t the end of the this journey but are taking me to the pathway that I want to be on.
In no particular order:
This site is CHONKY
Personal vs Professional
Wireframe-fu
These three steps I think are a great encompassment of the things that I find are most important to myself: design, UI/UX, and writing.
The site being chonky is fully reflective of the fact that I put this together in a hurry. Engineer art all the things! Buttons are huge and unbalanced, but functional! About the only part that I am currently satisfied with— to a degree, still needs refining— is the color palette that I implemented. Orange is warm and (to me) an inviting color. It’s also one of my favorites. (Green being the other, but too cool of a color to be a primary highlight color.) The header bar behavior isn’t quite what I want either. My Footer doesn’t even exist, but generally footers are either completely useless in a grand scheme or a much-appreciated accessibility feature. This place is so bare-bones the latter shouldn’t really apply. There are so many touch ups coming with the goal of documenting said changes here.
Where is here, though? “Writings” being the landing page of this site is fully intentional but adding in the old articles I’ve written helped me understand that I’m ultimately going to need to split the navigation. Right now, any wordy stuff all goes into the same place. I need to have a higher level “this is (entertainment | practice | some cool idea that came to me at 3 AM)” and “this is (business | professional | overview)". I’d love if the two could be mixed, but that’s not conducive to the ultimate goal here. “Blog” and “Writings” separation will be a big part of changing the flow of the site, allowing me to pull the articles in locally (of course linking back to my friend Joey for the original work) without having them clutter the "Portfolio” section which will be more visual going forward.
The Portfolio is proving to be harder than expected, though. I’ve tended to prefer my ideas put to literal paper before I anything else. Whether it be wireframe app designs, mockups, icon ideas, or whatever, I guarantee it’s in a notebook somewhere. In a box. Yay! I moved cross-country some time ago and not all of my stuff came with me. I have to slowly go through everything I have and scan it in once I find it. I can tell you not all of it is gems, but I am proud that my ideas are out there even if I never took credit.
I’m going to do just that for once and take this opportunity to say that the icon for elementary OS’ web app icon is something I helped create. I really liked the web browser (called Midori)* but it had this gaudy green cats-paw looking icon that I felt never really fit in. I took the idea of the web (globe, map, world), “midori” which means “green” in Japanese, and “balance” which is a roundabout goal of elementary. Became a yin-yang with a green leaf overlayed on a map. Handed the idea to the immensely talented Danielle Foré who made my idea reality and the rest is history.
I don’t like doing that, though. Never have. Tooting my horn is not natural to me and everything about this site is something of a pain. I hope that you’ll understand what I mean by this if you’ve made it this far, and, hey, thanks for coming! I hope that you look forward to the changes as much as I look forward to implementing them.
Until next time!
*At the time, since then, the icon has remained the same but I believe that they now use GNOME Web as their default browser. Same concept— shove webkit into a GTK container— but more developer power behind it now.