Where have the last five years gone?
The web moves at such an alarming rate that technologies and trends become extinct almost as quickly as they materialise. Five years after being built, my old site was embarrassingly out of date, utilising techniques such as sIFR and image replacement, not to mention the now clichéd astronaut theme. Perhaps most telling, I couldn’t allow it to affect my delicate designer ego any longer—the last thing I wanted was some potential employer or smug peer judging me on a five year old reflection of my ability.
So I started the long process of a site redesign, aiming to take advantage of some of the exciting new things happening—web fonts, css animation, media queries, SVGs to name a few.
Being the exciting and ever-changing industry we work in, newer techniques and trends kept coming—ones that made me question every design decision made and line of code written. As designers, we face a constant battle against perfectionism, and building products for others over the last ten years has taught me that sometimes we have to let go and deliver something that perhaps isn’t perfect. In the words of someone I can’t quite remember, “If it’s better than what we’ve already got, ship it”.
“If it’s better than what we’ve already got, ship it.”
—Anonymous
So here it is. It might be the result of countless late nights but it’s the projects like this—the ones where we just tinker aimlessly for hours on end, with no-one to tell us what’s right and what’s wrong—where we seem to learn the most.
I hope you like it.
