In 2020, a fortunate wind brought me to Frank Chimero’s website redesign blog series. The exact memory of that discovery is hazy, but I owe much to its influence. The effort to retrace my steps led me to a memory stroll reaching slightly further beyond that point in time. It was summer 2019, I was a couple months into trying to learn the ropes of graphic design on Lynda (now LinkedIn Learning) when I realized how poorly things were going. Despite memorizing every UX principle and documenting every obscure InDesign tool, I was fundamentally as good a designer as before I began… I lacked praxis. Around the same time, with the drop-shipping craze at its peak, my ever-so entrepreneurial father needed a Shopify website built. He didn’t have the time or will to learn how to set things up himself and therefore I volunteered. Why spend time and money hiring a random developer when I could spend part of the budget on these SuperHi courses I had been seeing for weeks on Instagram? Lucky me, they were even releasing a brand new Shopify course at the time. In two months, I promised him, two months and he’d not only have a website, but an e-commerce experience with a custom theme that would separate itself from the pack and make money.

Of course, it took me three, and the store, while somewhat beautiful, ended up failing miserably. But in the rubles of that failure, I had gone from staring at an empty Illustrator document to designing layouts in Figma, understanding the ins and outs of Shopify, and even marketing products. That felt like success to me. I had always loved these bursts of creative focus which happened as I started learning and applying my newfound skills in a boundless domain. The same had happened with music production, 3D modelling, and video editing to various levels of fruition. Likewise, both design and computer science felt like wells of knowledge and experimentation. I could draw inspiration from each one and build a flywheel to sustain my motivation until what I built could close the gap with my growing taste.

But as taste goes, the gap never really closed, and the idea of a personal website suffered the most from it. While freelancing, the work I did for clients was constrained by multiple factors, including budget, time, and their specific corporate environment. I felt like my little nest on the web should perfectly reflect who I was as a designer and represent the exact intersection between my skillset and my judgement. Turns out that’s a very complicated conundrum for a perfectionist. And thus, I researched, I read multiple design books, I read Frank’s redesign blog entries. I was inspired, but I procrastinated to get my hands dirty for years. An indecision which caught up to me when everyone at SuperHi was let go. Looking for a developer job with a Dribbble profile is, for all purposes, a masochistic experiment. I started a Linear project for this very website. I avoided it. The irritation grew. I began moodboarding and I procrastinated further. The irritation boiled. I got rejected at a late round for a role I was perfectly fitted for. The kettle exploded.

So here I am, eating my spinach. Publishing a website I don’t love yet, with a monospace I quite like, in the hopes of making it better with each brushstroke. So like Frank, and many others, I hereby turn away from the self to the public. Let’s cheer to the failures along the way, and the opportunity to purchase a new typeface… or two.