Why I made a plain text website
I made a new website. I wanted it to be simple. I have a fatigue of all the fancy designs, parallax scrolling, slideshows, templates designed by someone else and deep, multi-layered navigation. My inspiration for the site was Web 1.0 and linear, text-based pages.
I did not see a reason why any of the pages aside of the cover page should feature anything but plain text. My intention is to convey information in a straightforward, quick manner that is easy to read that gets visitor straight to the core of my site’s purpose?—?my professional bio, my work, my articles or my conference presentations.
This same logic applied to my profile and portfolio pages. With the portfolio page, I decided to keep the same visual language as with the other pages. I have seen too many portfolio pages with logos or campaign imagery on them. It’s a stereotype. My intention was to avoid anything but facts, literally black on white. The outcome is a simple list of brands I worked with and deliverables I was responsible for. I prefer to let the actual work speak for itself.
My profile page is also plain text. Because the medium of text is so bare and the actual content has nothing to hide behind, I had to work on what I wanted to say a bit more. It had to be well written.
I like to think that clarity, starkness and no-nonsense quality of the plain text format communicates something about myself and my work. Form is function. It is also something that sets me apart.
I am not afraid to go plain. I believe that the best stories are the simplest ones.
Follow me on Medium: https://medium.com/@andjelicaaa
Agent at AKKURAT Studios
10 年Within your article you write that you wanted simplicity and that your inspiration was Web 1.0 and linear text based pages and by the end of the day I’d value your site as executed poorly when speaking about user experience and interface design and the architectural process of the information you display on your site. David Lee’s site is simple and may not be web 1.0 (as such I understand usage of HTML3-4 only and little to no cascading style sheets for clarification purposes) but the user has a solid experience, content is easy to find and is displayed in a manner that communicates very clearly what he does and did and what he believes in. Further, I imagine your site to wake an impression of being unprofessional when considering that our industry has a standard of being epic being an epiphany - to each his/her own on that terms definition.
Focused Communicator | Marketing Analytics & Strategy
10 年I love your plaintext website
This really puts content in the users focus, and emphasises what your job actually is... Nicely done.
CEO Marla Aaron Jewelry
10 年I like it. I like what you are trying to accomplish. How could you take this simplicity and apply it to an e commerce environment?
God of Copy (back by popular demand)
10 年ok. it is definitely chrome, 64-bit version is buggy. works fine in safari :)