A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about my realization of just how terrible my design skills were and a path I embarked upon to start learning. It was slow and I had a lot of stumbles along the way. One of my learning projects is a lot better than this site with its giant icons and it’s a lot better than anything I have ever designed myself. But I’m not really sure about the fonts and the favicon makes me want to listen to Burn by Rancid.
But it’s progress and while I still suck, I suck a lot less. ChatGPT has been unbelievably useful while I have been learning design. It’s not the only LLM I have tried, but it seems to do the best job of translating my garbled impressions of what I see versus what I want to achieve into design principles. It’s also the best LLM at roasting me and has uncovered some creative ways to incidentally mention my 200 pixel high icons from days of lore. Or spring, whatever.
As I analyzed that site and kept practicing, I made some decisions. First, I admire designers who can work with multiple fonts but I’m not one of them. I figured that out when I was looking at some sites I really admire and started trying to implement them myself. It was really illuminating working through talented artists’ designs from a design point of view - as I worked through their solutions to problems that I have had, it was obvious that they just saw things differently.
Multi font was an excellent example. As I worked through other designs, I noticed their font choices looked really really good. They defined a clear visual hierarchy and were always readable. When the fonts themselves weren’t readable, they adjusted spacings between the the letters and the weight of the font until they were. But fundamentally the font choices were excellent - they looked good together and solo at every size I threw at them.
I’m nowhere near that. As I’ve implemented other people’s designs and watched their design process improve, I realized that while I suck less I am a beginner who has been using the tools for a long time. So, I had to simplify.
Also as I worked more and started to dig into some issues with this site, I came to another conclusion. Hugo was great for me and I’ll still use it for projects. But I needed something a lot more simple so that I could focus on learning how to be somewhat functional at design.
Eleventy has interested me for a long time but I never dived in, mostly because Hugo is just so comfortable. But the simplicity really appealed to me and so I dived in.
I will be using Eleventy a lot more because honestly, it’s really an amazing static site generator. Builds are fast and it makes sites feel very compact. You really just put your content into the directory structure you want rendered and build with well….it supports a lot of templating languages and javascript. I chose Nunjucks because it reminds me of the DTL (Django Template Language) and I really enjoy it.
Design wise, I went with one font. All the SCSS is custom. The theme is deployed across two sites with slightly different implementations and both come in with less than 3KiB of rendered css. Both sites are old and both needed some help (or an EMP).
Good old Siteimp.com was a great product in its first iteration but the web changed a lot and as the young folks say, ‘it just doesn’t hit the same way’. Err, I don’t think they say it like that. The second iteration isn’t public yet but it’s absolutely incredible. Don’t forget - I have a marketing degree so when I’m ready to launch v2, this space will be filled with more self promotion than a room full of social media gurus. The website was absolutely terrible.
Formimp.com started right after I first built Siteimp and kind of randomly decided that routing three form inputs on websites to other places couldn’t be that hard. It turns out that it is really really really hard. So hard that at one point, I was reading so much spam that I had a favourite spammer. Formimp was also a special product because I believe that it had the ugliest website ever launched in the history of the internet. So ugly that instead of sending goatse, people just started sending links to my website.
If you’re not familiar with them, I’m sure you want to google goatse or use the wayback machine to find the old version of formimp, but trust me. Just don’t. There are some things you don’t need to see - the internet has desensitized us in many ways so that bar has gotten a lot higher. But Formimp was really bad and you don’t need to do it to yourself.
I still suck - I’m an unbelievable beginner and both have a few things on both pages that are really bad. But I suck a lot less.