Designed Space

Oh boy, where do I even start with this one. So back in November 2015 I received an email from my now friend Mike. Back then it was a random guy on the internet. He saw my work with Ale and his Visual Journal and got in touch because he needed help with the new version of Designed Space.

Just to be clear, I know nothing about the history of what was designedspace.net and wasn’t aware of its existence. I even think the domain was expired. Anyway, Mike was looking for help. He had a design and was looking for a developer.

I’m quite familiar with Wordpress and so I would love to keep the site on that platform

I still find this absolutely hilarious. Mike now hates WordPress and I almost entirely stopped using it. Needless to say, DS doesn’t run on WordPress. It uses my beloved Kirby CMS.

Tech Spec

Since we’re talking tech, here’s a quick rundown of what’s used on the site. As I said, the site runs on Kirby. It’s currently hosted on Bluehost Cloud but this will change in the not too distant future. Fonts are Classic Grotesque and Ysobel, both provided by Fonts.com. The site also uses barba.js, flickity and LazyLoad.

A long journey starts with a single email

So after that first email I started working on the site probably a month later. That’s end of 2015. The final v1 went live in November 2017. Now you might be asking What the hell did you guys do in those two years?. Well let me tell you about those two years...

For start, Mike is an absolute pain. Yeah I said it. Never happy with the design of the site (and he's the designer), has always new ideas for things he wants me to code and add to the site. And he loves lists. Lists! Who the hell loves lists?? Anyway he kept changing ideas during those two years and I was somewhat dragged into this vortex of chaos and failed creativity and was going insane.