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I spent far too long in the planning phase.

My original plans called for something pretty ambitious and very cheesy: this sort of light metaphor with canvas that would 'illuminate' various sections of the site to traverse. It was meant to be an allusion to my past as a photographer, if you'll believe that.

The approach I had with this site was to create an experience, as alluded in the notes tucked away in these photographs, that was entirely comunicable though iconography.

In a grand defiance with what the web was meant for, I aimed at creating a site that needn't any translation, where text was just set dressing for the main event.

The original icons that the first iteration of this site used were too inspired by camera markings and circuit diagrams, both of fields I deeply associate with and enjoy.

In this current iteration, however, I've opted to only use UTF-8 icons, and load no external fonts or icons. I reduced social media glyphs to type, found suitable replacements for every icon, and built my site under the guiding principle that was energy efficiency.

I've grown increasingly concious of the energy impact of the internet, and the slow reality of present-day website bloat.
Patterning myself after solar.lowtechmagazine.com, I hope to one day run this site off of solar power, and these sorts of cuts were necessary.

Like low tech, I've also adopted tiny, dithered images and creative use of CSS to get around their size. A toggle exists at the footer of each page to re-enable full-color images without first clicking on them, should the look detract too much.

Quite the adventure, isn't it?

The original version of this site was built using the now-abandoned static site generator harp. I've since moved to what I could call a fork of Nanogen.

The idea to go for a static site build was mostly born of curiosity, and I'd also grown a little tired with the needless complexity introduced by wordpress as a CMS for something so simple as a portfolio site. The original harpjs and this new static site generator already fit into the ideals of a low-power, fast and decentralizeable internet that I aspire to, so I'm glad I didn't need to convert from that.

I don't think I miss the front-end.

The rest of the design process is right here! You're looking at it. Nothing is hidden, and the code itself lives in a little repo on Github.