I’d love to be a designer. I am for my own projects at least, but considering the amount of communication and cooperation expected of a useful team-playing designer, it hardly counts. I’m currently reading Design is a Job which I recommend to all would be professional designers and which I’ll probably review. It’s great to see all my design tenets affirmed by a season pro:
- Goal and strategy before design.
- No specific reasons for something, it’s a cluttering distraction.
- Design is not all sketching, it’s science (or sciency art).
I’m not a minimalist. I do prefer simplicity though. Minimalism can complicate things sometimes.
The current design is almost minimal. I believe it has what it needs to function, making it simple. It’s designed that way because it doesn’t need to do anything else. I’m not currently selling anything. I’m not focussing on sharing.
But if you think about it, looking at the homepage above, all the important things you’d see on a site with 20x the visual activity are there, in naturally arranged words:
The header:
“Hi, I’m Ali…”
The description:
“…environmentalist, technologist, writer, designer and vegan business enthusiast.”
The page and category navigation:
“Read a little more about me or check out my articles, reviews or thoughts.”
The subscription and contact options:
“You can get in touch with me on twitter or by eMail. Subscribe with RSS or eMail.”
And if you’re not on the homepage, you get this option under the post or page content: “Back to the Homepage,” where you can begin your navigation all over again. There’s no pushing or pulling you to do this or that, because I don’t currently want you to do anything (well, no writer will say no to a regular reader and no blogger will say no to a subscriber. But I’m hardly either right now, so…).
Just to assure you, the site doesn’t look this way because I don’t know how to make a ‘proper one.’ I’ve made a few. I’ve made and remade this one more than a few times.
How AliDark.com looks at the time of writing.
It looks this way because I don’t know what I’m doing… and I’m loving it. Or rather, I know I’m not really doing anything. I’m liking the stripped down feeling, the lack of baggage, the lack of feeling that would otherwise be tainting each word with unintended assumptions about me and why my site exists.
It was actually a fair bit of effort to strip down the default WordPress theme. Everything that didn’t have a known reason to exist was deleted.
Slowly, as I regain a sense of purpose, I’ll likely start to add elements that introduce that purpose. But then, when my life hits the next crisis point, I’ll blank-slate the design, delete 90% of the posts, and start the process of re-invention again. Although these days I do so much deleting that it outweighs the creation part 2:1. It’s an issue rooted in being a “multi-potentialite,” a term I’m not sure I dig but that works here.
But for now, it works, and I feel free to be simple. I might write more about what pleases me. I’ve been blogging for ages, but yet it all feels so new!