This is at least the sixth version of an online work site for me, but the only one where the stars have aligned to culminate in publication. Maybe it was not stars aligning. It was asteroids crashing.

Before this, I used a downloadable, InDesign-built PDF portfolio because of the format’s layout refinement and perfectly lockable design. That has died with the death of Flash and PDF-embeddable video.

Long ago I chose Textpattern, a CMS out of left-field, for most of my site-building endeavours. Textpattern appeals to designers who like to give themselves a hard time, think different and design outside of the WordPress box. For better or worse, as a creative I felt the need to represent myself in my own hand, rather than with a snazzy theme created by someone else.

I would have loved to have been able to plug a cable into the back my neck and download developer skills. It’s been quite the palaver to make a passable, working site. Much net-found Javascript / jQuery tried and rejected.

After chatting with artist Stuart Semple a couple months ago I decided to design way different and built an entire site. Didn’t work great on mobile though, so I scrapped it and started again on what you see now. See lesson learnt on designing in XD/Sketch first.

I chose the typeface Monospace 821 as it feels digital and analog, classic-modern, formal and awkward. A good match. (Then I went back to Helvetica — then back to Monospace.)

Lessons learnt:

Final-design everything in XD/Sketch/etc before coding it. Mobile versions, hover states, all that. If I could go back, much time would be saved. The below is a fully-fleshed site I finished a month ago after designing half the site in XD. When it was finished it just didn’t hit all the markers, so I went back to the drawing board.

My former employers are rad for providing those recommendation quotes on the front page.

[ For Chris Noble Design ]