Watch Hill Design

Yes, it is… although it hasn’t gotten very much attention lately. You see, soon after I launched this version of the site, I received an opportunity for a new gig that was just too good to pass up. Said gig has been taking pretty much all of my time ever since. Said gig also has me on the team that’s redesigning the website for a certain huge toy store. Details on that later… I think we launch in the fall. Before said gig, my intent was to move to full time freelancing, thus the redesign… but I hadn’t anticipated that such a good deal would come along so quickly that would put me at a 100% commitment to a single client. Not that I’m complaining… not at all.

So, yes… I’m still here. And yes, I’m still taking small side jobs. But right now, I’m pretty much up to my gills. I’ll make a point to update more often. (Man, does that ever sound lame. Why not just throw up an animated “Under Construction” GIF and complete the descent into web dorkitude.)

While not the full blown and complete site launch that typifies this sort of thing, this launch was a bit more… organic? Yeah, that works. I’m guilty of putting personal projects such as this one on the back burner in lieu of focusing on primary objectives. My current full time gig for one, client work, wife/babies/dog, training, house, etc. Not necessarily in that order, but all of them come before working on this site. So, it’s been dribs and drabs and will continue to be for some time as I continuously tweak and twinge this site until its the way I want it. Mind you, this is probably an eternal process… but we’ll see.

The site is running on Wordpress with a custom theme that I built. For the most part, it’s been a fun experience so far. I basically took a clean copy of the default theme, the CSS from the Copyblogger theme, stripped them way down and rebuilt. Suffice to say, I like building from scratch and using my own processes much better. As clean as the Copyblogger CSS was, I wound up rewriting the thing top to bottom, using the original selectors as a reference. I like the indenting style Copyblogger used, so I kept that as well. I installed my fixed-fluid-fixed three-column layout, and adapted version of the ALA Holy Grail technique, and voila… new theme.

As is usually the case with these efforts, the most fun is had throwing pixels around in Photoshop or, in this case, Fireworks. The design just sort of evolved as I experimented, then solidified… or is still solidifying. I threw in some of that reflection business that everyone seems to be using, along with buzzwords like Web 2.0… but I tried to keep it a bit more subtle.

So, here we go… I’ve started posting some recent work in the portfolio section, with much more to come. I’ve a few other sites and designs coming there, and some traditional media work I’ve done, such as pencils, charcoals, etc. I do those primarily as a hobby, but I find they help me flex creatively when I’m designing for the web and print as well. I may even throw in some of the writing I’ve been toying with. And, I’ve definitely got a few tutorial articles I can post right here on the front page. More to come…