When I decided that I wanted to simplify the design of my website this past month, I did what I always do. I fired up Figma, I created a new Git Repo to house the newest version, and I began brainstorming. I used color palette generating tools like coolors and Realtime Colors, I began searching for inpsiration on 99Designs and Awwwards, and I really tried to activate the part of my brain that I use when I'm trying to design a website.

You know? That tiny part of my developer brain. The creative part that I dust off at times when I'm working on something like a 3D model or some bit of fiction writing? Yeah, that part! Sure, it's a little rusty. I mean, the most I've used it recently was to dream up some hilarious Zonai creations in Tears of the Kingdom, but surely I could activate it for this! Right?

Wrong. Dead wrong. I was tired, I was on day three of trying to come up with some cohesive, simple, smart, clean design that would catch the eye of visitors and land me more freelance web dev stuff, and I was frustrated. This was the third time in a year that I was redoing my personal website. One coincided with the launch of a new book I had written. Another had coincided with a new job where I was leveling up some animation skills I could use. And now? Now I just wanted to share the occasional blog post and have a site that worked well on all devices. I don't care if it doesn't win awards or go viral. It just has to work.

Ah, there's the side of my brain I HAVE been using quite a bit lately. The developer side. The one that is analytical, the one I use to problem-solve, the one that gets from point A to point B with code. The side that I am constantly leveling up, the one that is writing an interpreter in Rust, the one that I feed constant information from the firehose online as I continue to learn.

That's when it hit me. I'm not a designer. The idea that designers and developers could be rolled into one as a standard is one that I don't subscribe to. I work with some insanely talented designers. They don't do what I do, and I CAN'T do what they do. And that's okay. So this is the final time that I'm redesigning my website until necessity tells me that I have to change it again in (hopefully) a decade. Or maybe these new spatial computers will force me to. Either way, if I ever do have to do it again, I'm going to hire a designer.

This is my first blog post on a new blog that will be used to share thoughts I have about the things I like. Web design isn't really one of those things. Web and software development is, along with video games, entrepreneurship, and a whole bunch of other random stuff. This site won't serve any other purpose outside of the blog posts, and it likely won't have a subscriber option unless it explodes in popularity (it won't, thank God). If you like what I write, bookmark the home page and check back. If not, shoot me an email to tell me you hated it, because I don't have a contant form here either.