003. Ditching the <table> tags
Despite being the right decision in the long run, ‘rage quitting’ my first gig in the industry felt like a low point at the time. I was barely out of school, my bank account was running low (probably because they weren’t paying me!) and I didn’t even have my own computer to do freelance work on if I’d had any clients.
My roommate had a beige G3 Macintosh running OS 9 that I could use in a pinch, but each new photoshop layer would cause the fans to spin up and the case to rattle like an old city bus on cracked pavement.
I of course did what any mature 22 year old adult would do… I called my Mom up and cried.
I belly ached about my stalled career, I whined about my lack of computer, I cursed and bitched about how I’d been wronged by my first job in the real world.
Like a good parent she listened, consoled, and offered a helping hand.
She agreed it would be damn near impossible for me to get out of this professional rut if I didn’t have the resources to do, and lent me the cash to buy a computer so I could actually service clients and get some money coming in.
That computer ended up being an Apple G5 power Mac, for those of you who don’t remember Apple used to make somewhat affordable tower PCs. Immaculate grey aluminum cases with rounded corners and interchange components inside that could be tweaked & swapped to the owner’s content. Of course this also mean certain features, like say a wireless card for wifi was still a pricey add-on feature.
I’m happy to say that purchase ended up being the kick in the pants I needed. Getting my own permanent set up allowed me to focus on building out my portfolio again (yes, it included pieces from my failed agency gig), secure a few local clients through Craigslist posting, and continue to improve my gratuitous animation skills.
Most of the small jobs I landed during this time ended up being local musicians, I’d hobbled together an exceptionally basic content management system (CMS) with PHP, and was able to re-skin the same base code for multiple musicians via the magic of CSS.
While front end development has gotten much more complex & robust, in 2005 web designers were just starting to wrap our heads around how much could be accomplished by swapping just a .css file. Or Cascading Style Sheet.
By separating the content & functional layers of a site from the style choices, the underlying code could remain the same, while allowing completely different renderings of the content on the front end by simply including a different style sheet in your code stack.
This was pretty mind blowing at the time, and one of the first sites I saw to really demonstrate the power of this was CSS Zen Garden. The site was essentially a gallery of splash pages, each with 2–3 paragraphs of text, a few header tags and a list of links for navigating between designs submitted by web designers across the world.
Designers and coders were invited to submit their own style sheet & folder of images, and visitors could jump between designs to see the power of just swapping out that single style sheet. The flexibility and creativity demonstrated was absolutely humbling.
Some designs would be cutting edge digital collages, with illegible text and a generous dose of little cross ‘+’ signs littered throughout. Others would be dark sophisticated serif laden pages, smelling of rich mahogany and leather. And of course there was plenty of distressed grunge heavily inspired by David Carson’s ‘Raygun’ designs, as was the style at the time.
Although none of those band sites met the lofty bar set by studios like 2Advanced, my new polished portfolio was enough to land some interviews, and what would end being a much more successful outing to a full time position.
Drawing boxes for money — In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic I started to draft up a long form career retrospective on my 15+ years working in digital design. Looking back on how the world and industry have changed since the first line of HTML I wrote.
I wasn’t sure if anyone would ever read it, and there’s still a large chunk of the story yet to be written. But in the midst of the 4th wave of the pandemic, it could be a nice distraction from the doom scrolling. Stay tuned for future chapters.
