Realign 2020

Like other designers, I enjoy updating my personal site every so often. In my case I do a major iteration every couple years with minor tweaks between. This current incarnation is almost two years old and I’m ready to make major changes.

When I launched this design in 2018 I remember thinking this would be my last site. I wasn’t under any illusion that I wouldn’t update this site again in the future. Only that I had a solid foundation that I could build on for a long time. Even if the changes where major, they’d still be iterations of existing content and aesthetics.

I have two main motivations for this year’s realign. First, I want to present my work from the last few years in a more complete way. The 2018 verison of this site listed projects, but didn’t go into much detail. There’s a lot there I want to surface. I’m looking for my next role so I need to present my work in a way that show’s what I'm capable of.

Second, I just want it to look cooler and weirder. Heavy emphasis on weird. With every iteration of this site since I launched it in 2006 I’ve made concerted efforts to make it look much different than the standard web designer portfolio/blog website. I don’t have anything against other folks’ sites, I just want mine to look different and strange.

Writing about it

Plenty of other designers are iterating on their personal sites and writing about their process. I enjoy reading those. So, I’m going to follow their lead and write about my process.

I’ve already started the process in a rough way. For the last few weeks I’ve let myself noodle on different areas of the design. I spent a lot of hours pushing points around in Illustrator for an updated logo and some fun typography squigglevision. I spent, I don’t know how long just fiddling with CSS in browser. I wanted time to play a while before I set out to really get updated content and design together.

With the initial play I have a rough idea of what I’ll write about. I’ll update this post as I go to keep a reference. Some of the topics will change and I’ll add more as I go, but below is a rough outline.

Realign 2020 Posts

After the the illustration work and in browser playing, I jumped back into Sketch to try to get at a more concrete plan and to play more. I won’t continue in Sketch to get a “complete” design. I prefer to do a lot in CSS. But here's a zoomed out screenshot of my current mess to get an idea of what I’m up to.

A screenshot of a messy Sketch document showing the current status of this site’s design realign
WIP design realign

You can see shell pages started for projects. I have six main buckets of work that I want to present in detail. There’s a lot more, but those are the ones that I’ll have the time and energy to pull off right now.

Here we go again.

If you have thoughts about this post, send me an email at me@tylergaw.com.