My personal portfolio was ancient in web development terms. I built it in the summer of 2016 and kind of left it there. I was proud of some of the animation and design I did, but it hadn’t seen any of the benefits of changes in technology that have happened nor the increases in my skills in the last 9 YEARS. I did some designs for a revamp as early as 2017/2018, but the new direction I was playing with never quite materialized and neither did a built replacement.
The new direction was a story based approach that I wrote some articles on, but couldn’t quite get together in my head in a way that really communicated the benefit to a customer/client. I was going to awake, evince and unveil the client’s story! (Yes, using obscure words is a grrreat way to quickly communicate what you do. I still think the approach has some merit, but my approach to that approach was messy and confusing.)
Around 2022/2023 I came up with a new idea that was going to be awesome. Something that would be impressive and show a high degree of both design and development skill. I was going to have a meteor crash through the floors of a house. As it loaded the meteor would quickly crash through the house scrolling the user with the meteor so that a user would start interacting with it at the basement crash site and scroll up to go back through time as the meteor crashed through different rooms of the house. Each room would showcase my different skills and experience. It was going to be awesome, make young men cry, and have everyone beating down my door to hire me. I did a quick sketch:
And proceeded to do nothing else… for like a year… Well that’s not true, I did make this mock up:
I know, it’s almost ready for production right? All I need to do is everything.
There was so much drawing work involved, and particularly drawing work I wasn’t sure I could pull off (perspective and I aren’t on speaking terms) that I just never did any of it. I was too frightened.
Finally in late 2024, I realized that if I stuck with that idea it would just never get done. So I decided to try to come up with an idea that would hopefully showcase those design and development skills while also would be something I could complete in a reasonable amount of time. I really liked the logo and some artwork I did for my Illustrated Sci-Fi site, particularly the “Artful Ansible” which is what I called the newsletter:
I wanted to do something interactive that featured animation and showed off a wide variety of skills in HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript (plus a whole lot of SVG), so I came up with a space battle and planet exploration idea like this:
It would have lasers that would shoot out from the side and then planets you could explore like my Portfolio and Contact etc. I’d also have a “game only mode” where enemies (the weird red thing above “Epic”) would come at you. I also designed some sort of heads up display screens for different parts.
I don’t know why primary-ish colors seemed like the right choice here. I think because I started with red for the screen when a user dies in the game. Lucky for your eyes (and the higher likelihood of clients), I didn’t stick with this aesthetic (Yes, “aesthetic” is being sooooo generous.)
I lastly did a mockup for when you explored a planet, in this case, the portfolio planet:
This (thankfully) isn’t quite how it turned out, but we’ll get more into that in Part 2.