The design of this website

I used to post my work on Instagram. Though my posts rarely broke single digits (half of which were from friends), I could sense a bit of momentum building, and if I had continued, I would have gradually built a small following. Eventually though, my hatred for Meta solidified to the point where I could rarely summon the motivation to post. While less cancerous alternatives (BlueSky, Cara) exist, there is a secondary problem, which is that any social media restricts your published work to a single form. Feeds and grids work for some things, but not others.

Pick-and-place website builders are also out of the question. I like things to feel basic, and don't get along with the transitions, gradients and rounded corners of modern web design. I also like owning all my files and knowing what they contain. html isn't that hard, so I can learn how to achieve whatever looks and functionality I want.

One of my favourite websites is Android Arts. Arne, the site's author, is a concept artist, but many of his posts aren't related to art whatsoever. He also documents little electronics projects, which makes his site feel vividly personal. It is purposely difficult to navigate; a place you can get lost in. I'm not super keen to emulate that here, and wouldn't have enough content (for the time being) to do so anyway. I do, however, aim to make something which gives as much space to the content as Android Arts.

I also love Bandcamp's artist pages. They are simple, geometric, and dense. Again, each page serves its content—the parts that grab your attention are those added by the artists. My site doesn't have elements like comments, profile thumbnails, follow/share buttons, or playback, so I can't achieve quite the same effect, but the inspiration is there.

With this in mind, what led me to the layout you see right now? In no particular order:

1. I am a sucker for wide margins. Having everything grouped towards the centre feels right to me, and I don't like searching in the corners for buttons or small-print. As a bonus, the layout works better for mobile than a normal desktop site, meaning I can get away with fewer compatability tweaks.
2. I don't hate light text on dark backgrounds, but my preference is for good old black-on-white. I also like dark mode(s), and having a white content area allows me to fill everything else in grey.
3. I want to avoid monochrome (too boring, especially since many of my drawings are themselves black and white). Hence, a splash of accent colour. To avoid skewing too heavily towards a single hue, I chose primaries plus green. I think a more definite scheme would create an unwanted dynamic between the images I post and the site itself.
4. The font is Arial or sans-serif. Legible and ubiquitous.
5. The click-to-enlarge-image javascript was written by Walt Guevara. I made several adjustments to get the result I wanted, but would not have been able to write it from scratch myself.

I haven't put a huge amount of thought into proportions or spacing. So far I have just tweaked things when they look wrong. I made the bones of the site over a year ago, and when I came back to it I didn't feel an urge to redo it all, which is a good sign. I'm pretty happy with it! Waving the cursor back and forth over the side bar is fun, too.