Photo courtesy Joshua Sortino.

The archeology of a design career

What would a future you find excavating the layers of past work?

I recently went down the rabbit hole of the Wayback Machine. My coworkers and I were coming up with concepts for an ugly sweater, and one of us pulled up snapshots of our company’s home pages over the years. Yikes. But, also, gosh, maybe my old websites weren’t so bad, right?

I went into graphic design from a fairly successful career as a journalist and editor. Because of that background, my sweet spot as a designer is integrating content and design, function and form. That thread has been a constant for 20+ years. What’s changed over time is my skills and the kind of design work I’m doing. What follows is a virtual archeological dig into my web design career, cringes and all.

(If you’re really into web archeology, check out this article at the Web Design Museum.)

Neolithic Age: Hand-coding html, tackling css for layout

My first portfolio site, circa 2005, was influenced by the work of pioneers like Eric Meyer and Dan Cederholm.

In the early 2000s, bandwidth was an issue: Fewer than 3 in 10 households had high speed internet at home. So my images were small — and mostly gifs. Black…