I felt like my site was almost too professional.

It wasn't particularly professional to begin with, but it still wasn't the way I wanted it. There was something satisfying about the way the columns and the sidebar slid together like a piece of expert woodworking, sure, but on the whole all the boxes felt astoundingly boring. I have kept them on some of the recommendation pages though. I love that little slide, and frankly I don't want to make the rec pages TOO fancy.

Now, I have to be careful with the current state of things because, frankly, it makes me a little motion-sick. But even with that, I'm much happier with it. There's some freeing about losing the boxes. I suppose they call that symbolism.

Comic Sans is a great typeface, btw. People mock it constantly, even today, but I love it. It's probably because it was the typeface for the original The Sims and I still love that game. It really suits the floating Frutiger Aero images imo. Really says, "I'm not to adhere to corporate standards of adequacy."

I initially couldn't quite figure out how to get the main page to work. Positioning the icons the way I had the bubbles previously just wasn't working out - everything stayed bunched up in the corner. I eventually made a pseudo-grid by creating 20%-wide columns and placing each icon in its own column. Then, to spread them out more, I created additional columns containing transparent images of the correct width (200px) and inserted them in between the icons. That's how I got the effect on the main page.

I'll need to tinker with the background somewhat. It looks good on desktop, but on mobile the image repeats itself twice. Doesn't look as good.

I tried creating a sidebar that would pop out from the edge of the screen. It worked for a little bit, but stopped working when I came back to it. It's possible it doesn't function in Firefox, which would be an absolute shame. I wanted to do some more with that for this site, and maybe I will. I'll need to double-check that it's a browser-agonostic function before one of my professional websites goes live. Instead, the earth icon now brings you back to the main page.

I'd like to make some big changes to the gallery page. I definitely don't want more floating icons; I was thinking of a carousel of some sort, or maybe I can figure out how to make icons whoosh off-and-on screen. It's not an immediate priority for me.

Tinkering with the html and CSS is a lot of fun. UI design is probably not a specific passion, but it's in that whole… art/graphic design space, and that's fine by me. I'm learning a lot about that sort of thing recently. I've been making posters, designing websites, just continuing to mess around with communication through art. It will probably help me in a few different areas of my life.

I started taking a course on it through CalArts. I don't really care about the name recognition of the university but it's so wild(ly cool) to me what sort of education you can find on the internet for cheap or free.

I love it. I got a "Strategic Communications Certification" from UC Boulder just so I could learn how to market a little bit. I'm most of the way through a "Professional Certification in Canva," whatever that means - mostly graphic design and branding through the lens of a specific piece of software. I took a course on electrical grids, another on data science in the public sector. I got a whole data analysis certification through IBM in December (which has been languishing a bit, unfortunately - I was using my job to practice, and then my job changed).

I'm going to continue doing stuff like this. I've got a strategy for which ones I'm doing and in what order, but sometimes a certain course becomes more obviously relevant to my goals - hence the marketing and branding stuff. You won't see too much of the results of that on this website, but elsewhere I'm already using it successfully.

What goals am I working on right now? Well, I've been trying to quit my job for months now, but the market is absolutely terrible. It sort-of doesn't matter, tho; more and more, I realize that working for someone else is not how I'm meant to be. I need to strike out on my own. And that's exactly where I'm going.