Ta DA! Here’s my new site! And, my first blog. I worked on this site on and off for about a year or so. I had tried to learn HTML several times and wasn’t getting anywhere, and for the last 10 months I had really worked on using some kind of web building site or product (adobe’s Dreamweaver, Muse, Edge Animate, Edge Reflow, etc.). But, either the code the things produced was incomprehensible (so no easy tinkering and changing things a long), or the templates were not what I wanted, or (and this was the usual case) it just would not do what I needed it to do.
While working on this stuff I did get moderately good at Adobe Edge, which is a lot of fun. I’m not completely sure how I’ll use it in the future, but it’s a nice layout for messing with things like timelines and loops and what not for the web. It’s a little like using After Effects to build a website.
As you can imagine that this would get a little confusing after a while: breaking a very long time line into multiple timelines and creating layer after layer of divs. It becomes a sprawling nightmare quickly. Probably, it’s best use would be making ads for websites, or little pieces of stand-alone, interactive animations.
So, after months of stubborn frustration (I call it stubborn because I had a friend who was willing, and did, knock out a site for me… but I had to follow MY VISION, darn it), I thought I’d give it one more try. So I designed the whole responsive thing in Photoshop, read some web design articles, then redesigned it in Photoshop. And then I pounded HTML 5, CSS 3 and Javascript into my head with a hammer.
It worked well enough.
Having a fully developed design in front of me helped a bunch. I designed it like I was going to hand it off to someone who knew what he was doing. And when it was time for writing the code I just went through bit by bit. This was where all those other “codeless” applications actually helped, they’re good at teaching the basics: media queries, what a “div” is, etc. I knocked out the rough site in about 6 weeks, learning each bit as a I went, and liberally using w3school.com as a reference. (Yes, I know… it’s not the best, unless you’re starting out.) And then asking ALOT from stackoverflow.
But, all these different loose pieces of web education did what they wanted to do: create a conspiracy of guidance that turns me into an amaeture front-end designer. And, POP, another web page comes into existence. It’s like a bunch of random gardeners, each with their own agenda, built a garden that grew carrots, when maybe they were hoping for squash. I am that carrot.
So, what was the big block I always had to web design? Some of it was applications. I’m a little dyslexic and definitely needed a nice forgiving editor (thank you, Brackets). But the biggest problem? I don’t like how the web looks. At all! The best website, is the ugliest magazine layout.
I get it. Text is king. You need it to flow around multiple screens, and be able to style its unpredictability. A website is something you read. Most of them anyway (God help us when it becomes something you smell).
But I’m an illustrator, and an artist, and I live for making the visual a confusing, horrible and strange place. Kind of the opposite of a graphic designer. Don’t get me wrong, I love good design. Sleek beautiful lines and calming white space. Designing a website is the closest thing you’re gonna get to building your own Frank Lloyd Wright house. But, I grew up staring at Byzantine, lush, catholic art (mom was an art historian). To me it’s not really art unless there’s 50 cherubs flying around, lots and lots of cloth flowing everywhere, and every dang color in the universe splattered across the canvas. What kind of web designer would Michaelangelo be? A crappy one.
But, I think HTML5 & CSS3 have finally arrived, for the loopy artist. Now every wingnut illustrator can put the cherub exactly where he wants on his web page. And, now that cherub can hang out in that approximate location, relative to all the other cherubs, as you resize the screen. It’s wonderful. It’s freeing. It’s not text.
Good flow of text and assets is something I deeply appreciate, especially when other people do it. But I’m a doodle first kind of guy. My war with words is far from over, and finally HTML & CSS is making room for me. Arguably, Javascript could always do this, and has for the brighter bulbs in the room. But, I wear my calluses on my knuckles proudly, and needed a little help. Now I’m deeply grateful for this opportunity to make the web a little more unpredictable, and messy.
