Here’s to Hope Post Graduation and the Americone Blog Dream

Here’s the hope, may she springs eternal and I actually update this site. It may sound weird but I’ve always been scared of my website. At least maintaining it and coming up with a design. This mentality put me into a forever procrastination cycle of self worth. Here’s that story.

Holy crap I bought my name

Yeah, I don’t know like 2010? Yeah, that sounds about right I was in a typography 3 class with a focus on web design and web typography. Things like understanding web-fonts and web safe fonts like Georgia, what to do about the print rules that don’t exist to a degree. Stuff like that. W

We had to buy a domain for the class and I bought my name. It felt kinda exhilarating for the low cost of like 20 bucks a year this was mine. My name with a .com after it was all mind. This was my face to the professional world of corporate interests and other designers.

I built a really cute portfolio website with some really basic photography, a light box, and a clean typographic style. For a first website this felt pretty solid. But I also felt lacking, I began comparing myself to other designers in my class as well as professionals and felt inadequate and I needed to catch up. I didn’t get to take any art or design classes in high school and a lot of my peers felt like they were leagues ahead of me. I needed to play catch up and thankfully (and cursed) I really enjoyed to learn so that was my going to be my ace. I would just learn new tech, new design patterns, new principles and build away. Or so I thought.

When I do like this and like that and like this and

While the college website was up and running I got to work on my new one. It was gonna be rad, I was already working as a web designer with 3 others with more experience so I would hit up them for advice. I told myself I had to learn Wordpress for the next website. Wordpress was the ultimate goal for a few reasons. One, Wordpress sites were huge at the time and still are. I think like 99% of the web runs on some version of Wordpress with some bastardized old version of PHP that is open to hacks.

I took the next few months learning Wordpress. I was becoming pretty well versed in Advanced Custom Fields, Gravity Forms, and the power of WP_Query. I even built a few custom plugins for specific client needs. Nothing crazy but stuff like grabbing API data and formatting into posts. Around this time I started building my own custom Wordpress theme for myself and it was daunting. The process itself wasn’t too bad but keeping up with so many pieces that needed to be built was. I wanted to do it “right” and have a folder for my includes within that a folder for my includes includes and etc. Because you know, atomic design was the beezzz knees at the time. On top of that I was gonna use SCSS so I needed to run that crap locally in theme folder to preview it all.

While I was toying with this set up I was already losing interest in Wordpress. It had too many moving pieces for me and I wanted to scale down. I was in databases, apache, and all this other stuff that was getting in the way of working on the actual website. Thats when I discovered static site generators and my mind was blown. Just run some command line to generate a whole site based on markdown and liquid templating language. It was perfect for my needs. So now I had to learn that. Threw my wordpress theme that I spent like idk 20hrs on into the trash. Something new was here and I had to learn it.

After a few moments of fiddling with outdated ruby and gems I was up and running. I remember my first site I build with this was a small little short story site. It was a little trial run with some gothic themes of bats and spooky textures. But this was the test site to figure out how to build my portfolio. Next was figuring out custom post types in jekyll and custom layouts for my projects. But before I could do this I needed a design.

Photoshopping out the Self Doubt

After I told myself I was going to learn Wordpress, then jekyll, and probably something else I also knew I had to update my design. When I did my first post college design I grabbed all the tools and tricks that were crutches for me. At the time I still didn’t feel confidant in my design. I always felt like I’m 30 years behind everyone else. I may be like the same age or younger then my colleagues but I felt like an old guy in a college class learning about the humanities for the first or a baby who just got object permanence.

Which is a weird thing to think about myself. I was doing multiple designs for client every week. Some better and worse than others but I was designing and getting better by leagues with each one. But this was my name on a website so it needed to be perfect. This is how I was going to get jobs, this is how I was going to show off my skills that I’ve acquired.

I opened up a photoshop file and got to work. I made something using my college logo with some updated graphics. I added a some of the new tech I was working on. Stuff like responsive slideshows, dynamic captions, and probably another damn light-box. You just need to click on those images to see a zoomed in version right? I made a homepage design, a blog post layout, a portfolio layout, a sick masonry grid design all the stuff that was huge in like 2013-14.

Then I deleted it and started again. Yup, just threw that psd in the trash because guess what? Sketch just showed up and it was there to answer all the prayers of the the web designers working with a photo app with too much stuff that you never used. Like if you’re opening up the liquify tool on a web design project you’re either making the CEO of your client thinner (which I guy I know did once) or you’re doing some next level web design.

I just had to learn Sketch now and bring over all skills I learned there. So I built a new minimalist style homepage there, with some cool responsive typography and actually built that site. Wrote one blog post that was like every other content filler post about my favorite songs to develop too. There was a site with no heart. I abandoned it like a month after. This design felt temporary. It was going to get better in the future I swear.

Bloggin and Portfolioing

One thing missing from this entire thing was the content. Yeah I would do a design or even some dev work but truth is I didn’t have any content. I had some ideas of what to add but never went through and gathered it.

Then there was the blog issue. I wanted to write but I didn’t know what to write. I felt like I had to copy what Chris Coyier, Brad Frost, and Dave Rupert did and write dev tricks. Truth is I feel like thats not my jive. It got clicks sure but I’m not the kinda guy to do 50 hours of css experimenting to write about it. I’m the kinda guy who reads that and decides never to use it.

The portfolio was another issue, I felt like everything I did wasn’t worth it in the end. I told myself, I would have done better so this project doesn’t count. On top of this feeling towards my new work my old work felt juvenile and not good enough. I put myself in this mind space where I had nothing. So there was nothing to build off of. The designs I was workigng on were just Lorem Ipsum and pretend. They had no meanign or heart.

Life Happens

So during this entire fiasco of trying to figure out and how to build my dream website life went on. I got married, had a few kids, switched jobs, bought a car or two. I was successful in both the personal sense and the kind that grandma tells some lady while waiting at the deli counter. She had no idea what you did but she knew it had something to do with computers.

The website designs and new dev setups began to take a backseat by the time the kids came around. Which was pretty good for most aspects of my mental health. Less focus on making the best work and being overly competitive but instead a need to make better work so I can keep food on the table, even if that food is plain pasta with a bit of salt and plain non butter bread. Kids are picky.

This was never going to be finished

I got to a point where I realized this was never going to be finished. I wasn’t going to do the work to gather portfolio items and if I did I told myself they weren’t good enough. I had no writing to base blogs off of. I had a forever procrastination machine with new technologies. On top of that I had a growing family and had to focus more on them and less on myself. This idea of a dream website with my name on it and something I could be proud of was slowly fading.

Within all of this I was also telling myself I couldn’t use a template or a theme because that wouldn’t be a real website. Where I got this notion, no clue. I think some toxic coworkers.

How I overcame this

So with this constant issue between wanting to learn whatever new technology or design pattern mixed with family life. How was I going to overcome these roadblocks that I put on myself.

I was watching a streamer one day while working (co working streams are helpful) and I said something like I need to build my blog. She almost instantly said don’t do that it’s the wrong idea. You’ll be working on it forever to be perfect and never get anything done. I didn’t even mention all I wrote above but she saw right through me. Must be same wave length and she already went through what I’m doing. So I took her advice and just threw up a default theme blog to get going.

Around this time I also started realizing that that I had to be kinder to myself and start small. I was in a therapy session talking about my perfectionism and need for everything to be done “right” where she said “what makes you think you’re doing something wrong?” Truth is I wasn’t doing anything the wrong way I would just tell myself I was due to preconceived notions of my peers. I need to stop caring so much about every huge detail and get working. So writing is the focus for now.

I kinda didn’t

These feelings of self-worth based on what tech, how good my design is, and etc still plague me but I also need to understand that its all me doing this and not others. I would tell myself what would others thing if I had a suboptimal design or overly blown database or didn’t follow what the cool kids are doing that I and my work was worthless. This is simply not true. So while I struggle with this still I’m also going to be pushing forward while reminding myself thats me talking and enjoy the process.

You’re already going to be doing a lot more then others by starting small

I bought this domain when I graduated college with the goal to build upon it and make a beautiful portfolio with a captivating blog. I would daydream and tell myself “when I get better at graphic design, learn something on this internship, get a job, learn Wordpress, learn Jekyll, learn x, learn y, learnt the true meaning of it all I’ll make this website and I’ll make it great.”

Then I would never touch it because I knew it would kick my ass with self doubt. So instead of trying to do everything all at once and be ready to go day one lets just focus small with the writing aspect. I’m going to start there and build off that. This default theme already has all the stuff I need and it can grow. No one is going to care or call me out of using a template. I suggest you do this too if my story sounds similar. Just keep it simple, use a template, and get going with the heart of the website whethere that be blogging or portfolio and work there.

If you read this.

Damn congrats you made it through my diatribes. I’ve decided that I will take all questions, comments, and concerns over at bsky.app. My username is my gamer tag vekzero. Might change out my domain soon to match. I don’t know if I even like my name as domain anymore. Good luck and godspeed.