Design is hard

Before reading this, please note that this was written very late at night.

So if I seem a bit pessimistic here, that's probably why.

First, some context.

Last week, I assigned myself a couple of maintenance tasks for both my site and my visual identity on the web. A redesign of the place I call home.

As it turns out, there goes a lot more thought to redesigns than one would first imagine. One does not simply sit down and do a complete redesign in one evening; It takes time, effort, and perseverance. As well as a clear and realistic goal to achieve.

Question is, where do I even start?

I've designed things before, mainly mock-ups—ideas meant to be thrown away or refined further to become usable—but never really designed something from scratch, let alone without a clear idea of what it was even supposed to look like.

I didn't have an idea of how the website should look like. So I began writing down things that I like, things that are unmistakably "me", but even then, I couldn't really visualise the design in my head.

I made drawings, flowcharts, and even experimented with using different layouts while refusing the same content. But I wasn't satisfied with the end results.

A means to an end

CSS is a very expressive language. It's easy to learn and build layouts and styles with, but hard to master. It's also a very flexible and ever-changing language.

Usually, there is no "one way" to do things in CSS, everyone does something slightly different, or uses a different method entirely. But to know that, you need to know the language, it's quirks, and how different browsers may react in their own, unique ways.

I am not a very creative person; struggled with hand-drawn art as a child, and had the same problem of not being satisfied with my works despite countless praise from my teachers.

So when I began making websites for fun I was disgusted at the idea of having to write CSS. I mean, to some extent I get mildly annoyed when I have to write a 100-something lines to CSS to get a project to look decent, but one thing that didn't really sit well with me is the language's unopinionatedness.

Sometimes, being unopinionated is good. But when it becomes too complex and starts looking like a hodgepodge of features and vendor-prefixed dreams strewn on top of each other, not so much.

Like, if you want to add a border to a box (in this case, a div element), you can use the border property, but you can also use the outline property, or you can use an outset box-shadow. And all of them solve the problem of adding a border to a box, but have their quirks, which makes you have to think about whether you should use one method over another.

Or, browser compatibility.

Look, I get that browser diversity is something that we should strive for in the open web. But when the three major browsers can't even agree on which features to ship, or how certain things about a property should function (which is also a problem in JavaScript land, another can of worms I'll deal with a later time), it becomes an annoyance.

It's basically a "what if you wanted to go to heaven— but God said 'No?'" situation, but as three way instead.

But enough ranting.

My point is that CSS, to me, is a means to an end. Other people might enjoy it, sure, they might also live from it existing (as a day job at a design studio, or as a freelancer), but I am not one of those people.

I just want to put the abstract images created by my mind into the digital canvas and call it a day.

The elephant in the room

No.

I will not use AI for this, simply because it is not me.

Sure, I can steer it to make it do things that are close to what I want to make, but that costs money, and time, and patience, as if I wasn't burning through those enough.

Another so called "elephant" are visual editors. But those have the particularity of being tied to platforms that I do not have control over; If I wanted to have less control over bunnies in space, I wouldn't even have bought the domain and would've stayed as a github.io page.

Which I am, by the way. For cost and hardware availability issues.

Anyway, what about the design?

I am thinking of leaving the design of the main website the same. But with a different font pair, colours, and a more stablished design system.

The thing about design is that to keep things accessible, you need to thread carefully with the usage of animations, colour, and other things, that it then becomes quite unenjoyable to do anything in, so keeping things simple helps me to avoid burning out completely, which is something I can't afford to do when my career is the same thing as my hobby.

For the apps though, that's a different story entirely. Mainly because it has different goals and baselines to meet— they are apps after all.

I just wanted to get this out of my system first before fully committing to the redesign because to me, designing is like baking sweets: it tastes better when it's made with love.