Big Spaceship, HUGE, Inc., David Martin, Wordpress, Readymag and Letting Your Curiosity Fuel The Creative Process
Today I stumbled across the beautiful portfolio site of Marc Anderson, Associate Design Director at Fantasy/New York. Curious to know what platform it was built on, I dug a little deeper and discovered it was created on a code-free publishing tool called Readymag.
Ugh. Here we go again.
You see, about 3 years ago I set to work creating what would be the most epic design portfolio ever made. I built it from scratch, hand coding every element of it — HTML, CSS, JavaScript…it was fully responsive with big, beautiful imagery. If it looked strikingly similar to HUGE’s website that’s because it basically was (not wanting to feel the guilt of blatantly copying/pasting huge chunks of CSS, I held myself to a self-imposed standard of studying how every bit of interaction worked, :hover states, media queries, etc. and physically typed every last line of code to what comprised thousands of lines of semantic markup. It’s amazing what you can find online–I found a replica of HUGE’s classic overlay menu on Typanus.net. I modified it to work for my site. I poured over countless Stack overflow articles to research viewport meta tags, Open Graph and JavaScript integration for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn sharing. I went back and forth tinkering with different overlay menus and functionality. The whole thing was an ongoing experiment with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript–it took more than 2 years to complete. I kept quiet about the real inspiration behind it (although anyone familiar with major digital agencies might’ve figured it out). But I’m not afraid to mention it anymore. Today I read an FWA interview with David Martin, founder of Fantasy.co, in which he related experiences early in his career when he too was fueled by curiosity, immersing himself in the world of client side development:
“When I started out I used to copy sites, totally copy them from head to toe just so I could prove to myself I could make them technically. I would then redo them leaving out the parts I felt could be done better and improve upon them…I realize now that was a good way of learning.”
I mean, If the founder of Fantasy can do it…
Unfortunately that site lasted only a few months. My perfectionism got the best of me and I quickly soured over it and moved over to a CMS solution, which offered big advantages in terms of development time and the robustness of available plugins. That massive effort was not a complete waste, though–I taught myself how to code and learned the fundamentals of responsive design.
My current site is a Wordpress site based on the AVOC* theme. This site took a considerable amount of time to put together. Not two years, but at least 6 months. I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on it from clients. I always thought Wordpress sites were code-free, as if the client could inherent it and manage their content happily ever after. Not so: there’s quite a learning curve involved, apart from publishing simple articles. My WP site has been up for about a month now, and after seeing Marc Anderson’s portfolio I’m considering tearing it down to move to the Readymag platform.
But even if I do start from scratch again, I have Wordpress under my belt.
You see where I’m going with this.
if I graduate to a drag and drop web publishing tool to build the 3rd generation portfolio site, the experience of learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and later CMS/Wordpress and now possibly Ready Mag (I suspect there will be some learning curve, albeit small), each experience will have served as successive building blocks, one paving the way for the next.
I’m not sure if there’s a point to all this. Maybe the point is: let your curiosity drive you — if you have a thirst to learn, nothing is a wasted effort.
The best designers are those that are self-taught, self-motivated and most importantly naturally talented. –David Martin, Founder, Fi
*Semplice Theme as of 11/2016
