Freelancing, Sinatra, and Motivated Design

Posted by Lance Ivy Fri, 01 Aug 2008 07:30:00 GMT

I’m hanging out my shingle.

Developing this small, focused page was very fun for me. My plan was to develop an online “business card” and not go overboard. I wanted it to stay small and lightweight (no database even), so I picked Sinatra instead of Rails. Nice!

The next step was designing. I like to think I’ve picked up some design mojo through osmosis the last year. The truth though is that my design muscles had atrophied a bit, but after learning a few new GIMP tricks and a few iterations of trial-and-error, I was happy.

Until I sat on it for a couple weeks.

Then I realized what I’d done—designed a boring page for some faceless consulting company. But that’s not me! As a solo freelance Rails developer, part of my value is a personal touch. Why hide that? So I went back to the drawing board, and a few iterations later was happy again.

But … ask me again in two weeks.

2 comments

Comments

  1. Frank said 20 days later:

    Yeah, I had a problem with weak design muscles before I started hitting the design gym about a year ago. I found that the thing that worked best for me was just a standard workout of 3 sets of 10 reps of hard design followed by a cool down with some light decolletage or sketching.

  2. cute said 22 days later:

    You are being replaced at uservoice

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