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Nestbuilding

By Ari | Jan 10, 08 06:47 PM

This image is a screenshot taken during the development of this site - it's sort of embarrassing to look at, so hey, we thought we'd share it. I think it shows how much better we've both become as designers, quite frankly. It also shows how far we can push something when we give it time. This site was about two years in the making, I reckon. This weirdly busy wood look we had going in this earlier version was cool at first, before we coded it prematurely and then struggled to improve what was already tragically flawed, our efforts just making it worse. We didn't figure this out until we'd spent countless hours poking at the thing.

It's kind of shocking how much time we wasted. Don't they say "designers are their own worst clients"? It's true, anyway.

The finished site breaks a lot of rules I usually hold sacred. The home page is a mostly cute splash page devoid of content, a big no-no. The navigation is erratic, jumping around and reordering itself and changing location and size. The sidebar elements vary from page to page, as do the things you find in footers. I'm afraid the Google Blogrolls on the links page don't work for Internet Explorer users (and perhaps others... thanks, Google, sorry visitors). I haven't yet worked out the kinks in the blog's comments and tags, the way they display. And so on.

Every time we broke a convention or integrated content from seemingly disparate parts of our lives into a new weird whole, while making this site, I found myself wondering if we'd end up with something incomprehensible. But it's true to our sensibilities - we aren't just designers, after all. I think (and hope) that it paints us for who we are, and explains in some way the various things we do to occupy and entertain and support ourselves. I also hope the blog will be entertaining. Aaaand I'll stop posting such meta content soon, which I'm sure will help.

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