The number one thing that made this website so long to finally make was my indecisiveness of the design. I went through a lot of different ideas, and most lost their appeal after a week. I liked a lot of my different tries, but the thought of making one that represents “me” and sticking to it was what used to scare me the most. This is a history of some of my more complete mockups, descending in recentness:
This was very close to being the current joshsand.com. I spent forever perfecting that “JS” logo by the title.
I wasn’t quite sure how I would code a reverse hover/highlight function that worked across the whole page, so I never got around to trying this design out. I still think it looks nice, I just have no idea how I would go about making it.
The plan for this homepage was to have the middle image generate randomly on each page load. Six different div’s would each have a few layers of images within them (randomly picked each time, of course), and when all of those divs were generated, the whole thing would be tilted 45°, making the triangle shape. Generative design fascinates me, and it seemed like it’d be an impressive thing to show off on a home page, but I figured it wasn’t worth the slowdown and long wait every single time someone went to my website.
This older design also had a randomly generated design in the middle, but more of a kitschy 90’s textbook aesthetic to it.
I would have loved to do a mix between old Gothic Blackletter type and the cliché modern, minimalist portfolio, but what I really needed to make it work was a family seal. I know my family has one, but none of my relatives seem to have a picture of it. Without it, this design went past being stylishly minimal to just being empty.
This looks more like a language selection page or a settings panel than a portfolio.
Bottom alignment! Experimental! I do like this design, but at the time I didn’t think it really fit my personality.
A handwritten page gave much more of an “I’m a serious illustrator” image than I could follow up on. I do illustrate now and then, but not enough to live up to a homepage like this.
This was the last design I tried to make for my previous website, goomz.net. Goomz.net was less of a portfolio and more of a hub where I could put my stuff and link to all of the forums I was a member of. This design was around the time I discovered my fetish for light grey everything.
I actually painted a texture for the background of this mockup and scanned it in, which makes this the design I probably put the most physical effort into making. It was very classy, with compressed Akzidenz Grotesk and such, and I’m slightly disappointed I never finished it. It was definitely worlds better than my first goomz.net design…
Ahh, the Star of 2009. I was 13 when I made this and had to use Dreamweaver because I didn’t know HTML+CSS yet. I could have done worse.