Wow, I can’t believe it. My website and portfolio is finally done! It still has a few missing minor features and a few bugs I might have missed, but the bulk of it is done. I also have my very first complete blog. If you want to help make it even better, please tell me if you find any bugs or stuff that generally doesn’t look right to you. Design critiques are also very welcome!

Also for those who are interested, here’s a bit of background information on the development process of the website.

A brief history

This website has been technically in development since early June 2009. It started out as a small and simple design intended to become a photography portfolio. In the span of only a few months I was able to make and reject around 6 different website designs.

In early August 2009, I had my first design that I felt proud of. It featured a black and blue-green bokeh background image with a nice header set in Avant Garde Gothic and headings set in Bebas Neue. It was a one page portfolio, had SimpleViewer displaying a few of my greater photographs at the time, links to DeviantART and Flickr and a small introduction text. It wasn’t much, but I liked it. However, that only lasted a few weeks. I wasn’t too fond of the dark colour pallette anymore so I went and did the complete opposite.

That time I decided to opt for a more minimalistic approach, highly resembling the current site’s look. Still set in Avant Garde, I opted for a very light grey background with pure cyan accents. That again was a single page portfolio, but was much simpler. It didn’t feature a Flash image gallery like the previous one did. I was being inspired by many minimalist website I had seen at the time through Creattica. It’s one of the designs that set me off on the right track.

In September, as part of one our web development courses in College we needed to buy a domain and a shared hosting plan. At the time I was hosting my one page portfolio on a free hosting plan. It was all I needed at the time, but for the class I needed to switch to paid hosting. It was a great choice. Not only was it more reliable but it was way faster. Once I got the paulmorel.com domain, I thought it was a good time to throw together something new. I only made a “Coming Soon” place holder page this time.

This new page went back to a much darker colour palette. It featured mostly black and orange and the headings were set in Klavika, my newest found love at the time. You may have seen this “Coming Soon” page if you have been generally following me on Twitter for the past year or so. I was even more proud of this design than my last one. During my last semester, around March 2010, I decided to take that particular design and transform it into a WordPress theme. It was one of my first themes. What happened, is that the design was awesome as a “Coming Soon” page, but totally sucked as a full website because it wasn’t built to be one. It was destined to be a placeholder website design.

A change of style

I kept the black & orange “Coming Soon” page for at least a full year, until December 2010, before changed it for something more up to date. I started looking at a lot of different design styles and websites design. Creattica was an amazing source of inspiration for websites designs. I always found the minimalist designs were the most impressive. I subsequently discovered the existence of Josef Müller-Brockmann, a notable Swiss graphic designer, and I was highly impressed and inspired by his very minimalist works. His masterful use of the graphical & typographical grid on his numerous posters is amazing. You can see most of his work on Blanka.

Ffffound was another great source of inspiration. It frequently features a lot of vintage posters and other awesome stuff like that. Sure, posters aren’t necessarily the greatest inspiration for website designs, but the general style of them are quite interesting.

From that point on, I decided I needed to cut out everything that I felt wasn’t useful. I decided to start by something simple, yet fundamental: a personal identity. I did around 12 different sketches and chose the one I liked the most. From that point on I started check out some new typefaces I could use, and I quickly found the Hoefler & Frere Jones typefoundry. Makers of the amazing Gotham, Verlag, Knockout, Tungsten, Sentinel and much more. I really liked the Gotham & Knockout combo and decided to check out some alternatives. Likewise, Nevis & League Gothic are both beautiful typefaces that resemble Gotham & Knockout.

Today

Since January 2011, I started designing and this website happened! It took a few months to get the design to where it is right now, but it was totally worth it.

To conclude, I wanted to list some of my major inspirations for this project, such as Josef Müller-Brockmann’s book Grid Systems in Graphic Design, Grid Based, The Grid System, Line25 and a lot of artists & designers on Dribbble. Some of my main resources of information were, as always, Smashing Magazine, Web Designer Wall and the whole Tuts+ Network. Another godsend for this project was A Book Apart’s HTML5 For Web Designers. It was remarkably useful, as it provided answers for a few questions I used to ask myself about HTML5 semantics. I’ll go more into detail soon enough.

I’d also like to thank a lot of people for their general help & support throughout my whole project. Mainly my girlfriend, Marie-Michelle, for her continuous support and help on the design. Luke Beard for a bit of design help. The Zerply team for giving me a bit of exposure during the development of my website. James White for being a general cool dude and answering my questions during his broadcasts. I’m probably missing a few people, but thanks to you guys too!

I think that’s pretty much it. This was quite the blog post too. Thanks for reading and welcome to my website!