Goodbye, nateGdesign.com. Though I’ve known you intimately for 4 years now, I feel we’ve grown distant over the past…3.5 years. In the beginning, there was a passionate love affair but I quickly grew tired of your high-maintenance ways and your limited communication skills. Consequently, I have left you to rot in your small corner of the interwebs. We both got busy, and I found myself fascinated with newfangled ways of sharing my artwork and thoughts with people. I’m not bitter; You were a good learning experience. And I’ll probably keep your email for a while longer. But it has come time to put the nail in the coffin and move on with my life.
Those of you who know me probably recognize the name “SeventhSTR1NG” from somewhere. It’s been my alias for years now on various internet locales, but I’d never thought of incorporating it in my design work. Maybe because it seemed too imperfect, too ambiguous, too lacking of some clever design metaphor or pun. And why is there a 1 in there anyway? That may or may not have something to do with the fact that SeventhSTRING was already taken by someone on AIM like 6 years ago. Such is life. I even briefly contemplated changing myself to something like “ntrospekt” (which was promptly made fun of by my peers). People don’t like unnecessary change. So rather than wringing my brain for more hours on end on how I could perfectly brand myself, I just decided to roll with it. It really didn’t even matter. What did matter was that I was wasting valuable time that could have been spent creating new content and evolving my space on the web.
Enter the new SeventhSTR1NG.com, my new home on the web to display my design and photography work and share interesting or relevant thoughts with those who would care to hear. Surprisingly, after looking at it for months, I’m not sick of it yet, which is a good sign. Off and on over the past 6 months or so I’ve been toying with my new site, and it’s actually been a very enjoyable process. I’ve learned a lot about wordpress and got to really dig into some fun web development because I could experiment with whatever I wanted. I’m not by trade a web developer – I spend a majority of my time as a designer online and offline. But the two are so interconnected nowadays; It’s almost a must that designers have a continually growing knowledge of coding. It can only benefit you in the long run.
I wanted to do something a little bit different than the usual design blog, something that was simple and uncluttered and polished, but not boring. Most of all, I just wanted something fun that would hold my interest and I could continue to build on. Among the things I’ve chosen to incorporate are a custom image for all blog posts, a simple custom sharing button, a branded URL shortener (str1ng.me), a flickr feed on both the design and photo pages for single portfolio pieces, Custom post types for articles, photosets, & inspiration posts, a music player to share some tunes I’m into at any given time, and other behind-the-scenes stuff. There are plans for other things too in the next revision, like an improved jukebox that doesn’t have a perma-broke scrollbar (not my fault…), more custom post types, and whatever else tickles my fancy. There’s still optimization to be done, so if you have any feedback for me, I’d love some comments! If anything is broken, let me know.
Oh, and I made no attempt to try to get things to work in IE6.
