Tales of a Designer

Looking Back

Every few weeks I like to go into my portfolio to glance at some designs I did awhile back to see how my design and coding skills have progressed. I also look to notice whether or not my designs are timeless and look outdated after a year. Well early this week I was inspired by Steve Tuckers redesign, so I went digging around my server space, and I found the first design I did under this domain name.

This design was my very first “professional” site for myself that I designed a little over a year ago. Now, of course I had done many designs before that, but they mostly weren’t for myself, nor were they a big representation of my skill set. But the one above was my first.

Now, inside of the portfolio of version 1 of my site, there are some sites that were started that never saw the light of day, some that are no longer used by the client, some who’s designs have changed, etc. So it’s obviously an old portfolio.

One of the more interesting things I found in the old portfolio is the very first site, that I was proud of, that I built for a class project. It was to showcase some of the photography that I’d done. Now, this was over two years ago, but the design was highly inspired from another designers’ site from his old portfolio, which I found out a year later!

I clearly remember wanting to use the same layout, so I did because it fit my project, and I wanted to learn how he did it. Now, I accomplished finishing the site, however didn’t make it quite as nice as the one that he had. No big deal to me (at the time) because I was learning from it.

I look back now and wish I would have credited him because normally that’s pretty frowned on. It’s funny now because he is one of the designers that I look up to and have learned tons from his writing. Of course I could be looked at negatively from this, but hey, I was quite the rookie that was eiger to learn. At least it wasn’t for a client or something!

Never-the-less, I don’t regret it now, because I learned alot, and when starting off in learning how to code and design, it’s useful to be able to have someone to look up to and learn from. Now that doesn’t mean that it’s good to steal code or anything, but at the time I just wanted to learn, so I picked apart code to learn what was doing what.

So the point of this post (I guess) is that it’s good to look back on past work and see how much you’ve progressed. I’ve learned so much from starting off that I feel like I could write a book, yet at the same time, I feel like I’m far from where I want to be. But seeing my old site was interesting to me, because for my first portfolio site, done over a year ago, I still like it. I actually wouldn’t mind if that was my site now!