My web work started in 2003 when I moved to New York and needed a site. The bulk of what I learned came from how-to manuals, video tutorials, free online classes, and friends. The first site I built professionally was for Cross Architecture, after the architect noticed I had built my own.
Small sites that carried a practice.
i–iii
Geminola
A West Village fashion boutique that turns vintage fabrics into couture clothing and houseware. The project started with a long on-location photoshoot: about 900 photographs of the goods, the exterior, and the more interesting interior details of the shop.
The owner already had the domain; I got FTP credentials and built fast. iWeb as the scaffold, with HTML snippets dropped in where customization was needed. The slideshow, for instance, called out to a Flash animation built in external code. The hero composite for the homepage was assembled in Photoshop from press photos the client supplied and visual elements pulled from my own photography archives.
New-Emergence
Kobi Skolnick has a background in social activism and a master's in negotiations and conflict resolution from Columbia. The site is a platform for his leadership development seminars and a launchpad for a book about his upbringing in an extremely orthodox Hasidic Jewish household, his service in the Israeli army, and his subsequent shift into activism against extremism. I first built him a site in 2009 in connection with a joint peace tour run with National Geographic.
The site is on WordPress with parallax and a few animated elements: a sentence that appears to be typed live, a drop-down that resolves on hover, the slow-scrolling background that gives a sense of depth as the page advances. Kobi doesn't own the domains; I do, and I still host the install. The early ConflictingPeace homepage carried a hand-drawn Jerusalem skyline, scanned into Photoshop and pushed toward a sun-setting effect, done to recreate a photo the client wanted but which had been shot at too low a resolution to print well.
LAKE
The first website for the band LAKE, out of Olympia, Washington. The band has gone through many iterations of the site since; the one I built was the longest-running. The homepage look came from photographing aluminum foil, sunlight, and drafting vellum through a digital SLR. One of the singers, Ashley Eriksson, had drawn the menu by hand, which we used as the site navigation.
One of my proudest small wins: for a stretch, the LAKE site sat at the top of Google's search results for the word lake, beating out every actual lake on the planet, and beating out the Wikipedia entry. It now ranks around eight, even though the band is more popular than it was then. Google changes the algorithm constantly; it was a good fight while I was running it. I still host the domain on my shared server, along with about half a dozen other sites.
And this is how it shows up in everething The everething OS, the storefront, the content curation: they all come out of the same practice. Twenty years of small sites taught me that the tighter the surface, the more it can carry. That's the brief for the device.