I just went through my archives, because I wanted to see what happened when in my development of The Embroidery House.
This image [2022×372, 213KB] is a string of all backups, generally made after a big night of fiddling around with things.
Icosidodecahedron.com usually gets backed up once a month, it seems, and has also come a long way.
The Embroidery House creation, from left to right:
- February 11th: This was actually a rough draft, which was only meant to show the functionality behind what I was doing: using a primitive AJAX form to load the clothing from an XML file. I got carried away, and tried to make everything look like stitches. Most everything had custom padding or margin, and almost all the style was inline. At this point, I was still mainly a programmer who did web stuff on the side.
- February 23rd: Having finished the AJAX, I decided to try beautifying it up. This wasn’t my first day with this design, but I don’t have backups of the other days. Basically, I decided that the site should be sporty, and sporty sites always had bold reds or blues, and usually whites. I wanted to give the site a textured feel, as if it were made of fabric. On February 19th, I had my Great Epiphany and became a web designer/developer. On the same night, I discovered transparency and abused it about as much as you’d expect someone to abuse something he just found. The logo suddenly looked like a watermark, which was appealing to me, but then I was trying to make practically everything transparent, and it just didn’t work. I was going to put a fading-transparent set of coat-hangers in the corner, so be thankful I didn’t. At about this time, I had discovered Doug Bowman’s A List Apart article called Sliding Doors of CSS, at just that point where I was experimenting with making my links more like buttons.
- March 4th: I eventually decided that the last style was so disgusting and unforgivable that I scrapped the entire thing and started from scratch (except the styles set up to lay out the clothing). I settled on a minimalist approach, to really bring out the soft cream of the fabric in the background. I made the main navigation blue, because red just seemed stupid. I also made a bit of javascript that loaded up a Google Maps window if you clicked on the address, which I was kind of proud about. My client had finally given me the text for his logo, which I used in a sort of banner text.
- March 10th: A week later, not much had changed. I had fixed up the styles a bit, and made the items look more individual. I started working on the UI, so that the site would be actually usable. Some things got re-written, as well.
- March 24th: My client finally got an idea of what he wanted the site to look like, and drew up a plan. He wanted sky above, with the menu above the main content area, and a sidebar for showing new items. I chose some colours quickly, but things ended up looking a bit aquarian. I ended up completely changing the style. I was in the middle of converting the pages to PHP, which finished a few days afterwards.
- August 2nd: There were other steps in-between, but few of them are stye-based. I went through a phase where there were trees in the sidebar, but the client didn’t like it. I photographed the sky and took samples from that, so the tones should be far truer. I tried to give a gradient feel, to replicate the gradients of the sky. I also tried to keep the images small, to fit with all screen sizes. At some point, I filled the sidebar, redid the copy on most of the pages, consolidated those extra pages (like About and Contact) to a small toolbar in the corner, and added a miniscule floating footer. I redid the entire clothing system to run with php, from a database, and added the options to filter those. I’ve got to add sorting, sometime. At the moment, you can sign in, browse clothing, select the one you want, and add it to a cart. I’ve also added a forum, though it’s yet to be used. I also haven’t actually changed it for about a month, so it’s really more like July 2nd.
Quite a list! I think, if the entire project were to be erased, I’d be able to get everything back up the way it was in a little over one month. At the moment, I’m waiting on the client to finish a list of chores he needs to do to complete the site. I’ve been doing logo work for him, in the interim.