Where’s all the evidence of that
Well, here’s the thing about The Internet, gang: it’s fleeting. Most of what’s on it is temporary.
Here today, domain expired tomorrow.
Maybe a better way to phrase it is that the interactive universe is constantly evolving and expanding. To that point, most of what I’ve designed in my now decades-long career isn’t available for live viewing in a browser.
I’ve been designing and developing interactive projects since Google was still young and before the iPhone even existed. “Mobile-first” wasn’t in our lexicon and legacy terminology from print publication design (The Fold) was still used as the main guideline for the hierarchy of site design.
The subtitles for us as designers have gone through their own evolution as well, from Web Designer to New Media Designer to Digital to Visual to UX/UI and now Product.
All along the rollercoaster ride, though, the core principle of User Experience has remained the same: Get the user where they want to go as intuitively and efficiently as possible.
From that perspective, a page I designed in Photoshop in 2005 isn’t all that different than one I did in Sketch in 2019.
Potato, tomato.
And speaking of software! That’s been it’s own little March of Progress.
The first sites I designed actually were done in Photoshop. The first sites I developed were built using Tables structure, and Flash if we wanted to be fancy. At Macmillan Publishing, I worked with UX designers who built wires using InDesign. You laugh, but I thought it was a pretty innovative use of that application.
Prototyping consisted of coding the site, pushing it to a staging URL, and seeing how much of it was strobing and upside down. Then came the wailing and gnashing of teeth and editing of code.
Later, of course, came WordPress, Sketch, MAMP, Invision (soon-to-be RIP), Marvel, Adobe XD, etc. Figma is the latest big fish zipping around the UX/UI pond and I’m betting it won’t be anywhere close to the last.
The point of my little history lesson here is that archiving is almost pointless.
The rate of revision and speed of irrelevancy of interactive product is almost immeasurable. There is minuscule permanence in that world.
All the same, I’ve given it a go here. What live projects I’ve been able to, I’ve housed copies of on my personal server for posterity and your perusal. Others I’ve crafted into the static mosaic you find yourself scrolling through currently.
Clearly, I couldn’t include everything, but I think this collection is a solid showing of examples from the catalog of work I’ve completed since I professionally designed and built my first site in the Fall of 2002.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the trip.
– j
