It’s alive!

• Posted: November 14, 2006
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• Author: Chris Murphy
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• Filed under: General, Uncategorized
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• Tags: No tags set for this entry.

Barring some minor development issues and a few bits of missing text blocks, farfromfearless.com is finally in a semi-presentable state. I was debating the wisdom of releasing a site thats only 98% done but nothing is ever really finished until you're bored to death of it - I probably should have named the site farfromfinished.com in hindsight.

Well, seeing as this is my first real entry into my new (read: first) blog, I thought it would be appropriate to highlight some of the influences that led me to starting a blog of my own. My wife and I used to run a design inspiration site a while back called xygoxen.com which was largely focused on the design community. It was small, had a decent following and received a pleasant amount of attention for the time (1999-2002). It eventually branched out with ambitions to be more of an entertainment portal with a design industry skew. My wife and I re-designed it from the ground up and I developed a handful of tools aimed at increasing participation from our users. Unfortunately life stepped in and xygoxen.com was relegated to the backburner where it eventually collected dust and perished due to lack of interest on my part – may it rest in piece[s]. Early this year I got around to thinking about reviving it and even went so far as to design a series of new logos for the site.

I don’t know if it’s me or simply a continued lack of true enthusiasm for the concept, but I ended up shelving it once again and narrowed my focus back to something more personal. farfromfearless.com was intended to be a flash-based portfolio site but I didn’t find that concept very interesting at all and the amount of commitment it would take to maintain it outstripped my current budget for time. Around the same time I was looking at what was happening on the web with standards compliant site design. A lot of it really blew my mind because I come from a print design background where certain layout rules and concepts just couldn’t be applied to web-design without costing the user in terms of patience and bandwidth; and honestly I’m a bit sick to death of all the flash sites out there. Debatably one of the most popular forms of standards-compliant design is blogs; it mixed everything from writing and design into a creative, tangible form with the ability to update the look-and-feel on a whim. How wicked is that?

With that in mind farfromfearless.com was born.

So here it is: my first blog. I thought it would be nice to give mention to some of the sites that inspired me in this direction. All of them, in one form or another, provided small bits of inspiration that contributed to the concept for farfromfearless.com.

http://www.whatdoiknow.org
Todd Dominey’s blog always makes me feel like I’m reading a daily. My first job in the design industry was as a layout designer for the Vancouver Sun. Dominey’s site has a lot of the same elements and typographic approaches that I typically like. It doesn’t hurt to have content that’s fun to read.

http://www.simplebits.com
Web-designer Dan Cedarholm, has gone through a couple iterations of his site since I’ve been a regular reader. This latest one is a much simpler and straightforward approach to content and layout. What I really love about this design is the details. Little things like the bullets for lists, and icons for various links and what not are all lend to the overall pleasant experience when visiting his site.

http://bartelme.at
Jon Snook introduced me to this site. Wolfgang Bartelme has always been generous with color. It is probably the most striking thing about his site when you visit it and I regularly go back there just to get a dose. Like simple bits, Wolfgang has gone through a few design iterations over the last year – this latest one is perhaps his most ambitious seeing as he switched over from a custom-made CMS to ExpressionEngine. His archives are a great source of inspiration for ideas and an excellent resource for tutorials. I love seeing how other designers approach the same challenge.

http://veerle.duoh.com
Veerle’s site is stunning. I came across it during my search for a blogging engine that I could feel comfortable developing with; in the case of Veerle’s blog, it was after coming across ExpressionEngine. Regardless of the software powering her site, she has an amazing sense of layout and color. If you get a chance look through her archives for previous versions of her current design.

http://www.alistapart.com
Taken from their “About” section: “A List Apart Magazine (ISSN: 1534-0295) explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.” This site has been an indispensable resource for techniques and insights into standards-compliant design and development written by a host of contributing authors. Take the time to read through their articles; there’s a lot in there that might save you a lot of time and hassle with your next design.

These sites are only a small cross section of what has inspired me. There’s a ton more that I could mention here but I’ll save those for later.

I should also mention a couple people who really helped me out in the implementation process. Aaron Pepper is perhaps one of the wickedest CSS/PHP developers I’ve ever worked with – the guy is a prodigy with CSS; and Jon Snook of snook.ca, another awesome developer I used to work with and one who not only showed me the benefits of maintaining a blog as a creative outlet but is also a continual source of inspiration. His sometimes unorthodox approaches to UI design and implementation always come across as common sense. Jon was kind enough to hook me up with some web space to host farfromfearless.com. Far from being complete, this site still has its share of growing pains and small issues to work out in terms of true compliancy with my markup; I’ll get to those eventually.

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