I have never designed a website for myself. I’ve designed hundreds of sites over the last 10 years (not all made it of course!). I’ve ‘interpreted’ brands, created unique look-and-feels to reflect user personalities, designed logos, invented colour palettes, come up with image guidelines, written style guides etc. etc. In fact, I really cannot remember half of what I have worked on. But none of it was for me.
Designing anything at all for me, to reflect my personality and style has never got very far. I think the crux of the problem is the feeling that anything I do for myself should perhaps reflect a personal style and inversely that that anything I do for myself may be viewed as my own personal style. I think this is my main problem. I’m not sure I have a personal style any longer. I’ve created a whole range of sites in vastly varying styles, from children’s learning sites with cartoon characters and bright colours through to fairly minimalist corporate sites with hardly any images or colour at all. I no longer really have a strong preference when it comes to generalities of styles that I like or don’t like, but instead I like whatever works for the specific needs of the target audience in question. I like dark sites, I like busy sites, I like minimalist sites, I just like too many damned sites and styles, and without meaning to sound arrogant I could probably design in any style at all.
There is also the fear of judgement. I’m a designer. My site has to be original, perfectly executed, beautiful and polished, reflecting and maybe even pushing the boundaries of current design trends. If I was a landscape gardener I would be expected to have more than a mud patch behind my house. I will be judged. ‘They’ won’t tell me they are judging me, may not even know they are judging me. But I will be judged none-the-less.
I have probably started about 20 or more personal portfolio sites. Sometimes they die within an hour. Sometimes they may make it to a whole week of excitement. But then it happens. I suddenly hate it. It’s not cool enough, not original enough, it doesn’t reflect me. It simply isn’t good enough. Then the Photoshop file is pushed into a folder called ‘Leigh’ and there is stays.
It happened again last weekend. A rush of excitement at the concept, frantic piecing together of elements, a flourish of colour and ideas. This time it will be great, this time it will be really original a thing to be proud of. Looking at it now it just looks a bit silly:
And so I’ve decided to ‘go with’ the posterous.com look. A basic, simplistic ‘non designed’ site. This will avoid the issue entirely allowing me to concentrate on actually adding some content !
Maybe for a designer who wants to have a space to simply house his portfolio/archive, whilst writing the occasional blog post and wanting to avoid becoming out-of-date or old-fashioned, this is no bad thing.
