Version One: Fingerpaint

September 15, 2004

I’ve noticed a recent trend among web devel­op­ers releas­ing their first gen­er­a­tion web designs for his­tor­i­cal and resource pur­poses. In my opin­ion this shows that every­one has an evo­lu­tional process when it comes to design, be it web-related or not. For exam­ple, Dave Shea of Mez­zoblue, doc­u­ments his site’s aes­thetic (and log­i­cal) evo­lu­tion in A Dif­fer­ent Kind of Perma­link.

Fol­low­ing this trend, and real­iz­ing its implicit sig­nif­i­cance, I’ve shown you my first web site enti­tled EMWare Pro­duc­tions, scrapped from Archive.org’s Way­back Machine.

That said, I’d also like to show you the orig­i­nal kartooner.com site, of which I deem Fin­ger­paint. It might not sound as robust as Pro­ton but for me it’s some­thing to reflect upon and real­ize where I was, design-wise, 3 or 4 years ago to where I am now.

kartooner.com [version 1] 

14 comments

Luck­ily, very luck­ily, my first sites were never archived and aren’t acces­si­ble even with the Way­back machine. I think my first attempts were on a free host as well. Dare I say it? Should I be hon­est? I may even have had an “Under con­struc­tion” flash­ing gif on it at some stage…

…I’m going to skulk away in sheer embarass­ment for admit­ting that now.

by Gary on September 15, 2004 at 9:53 am. Reply #

Gary, I think we all at one point or another, had an Under Con­struc­tion graphic on our sites.

It took me about 6 months to real­ize a web site is always “under con­struc­tion” because it’s likely the web devel­oper or designer is never 100% sat­is­fied with their design, con­stantly tweak­ing it for optimization.

by kartooner on September 15, 2004 at 9:57 am. Reply #

I know…

It was a bad period in my life…they were just so, “flashy”.

Good taste and band­width issues didn’t matter.

I had to have more! Every new flash­ing gif I put on the site made it look more impressive…the big­ger the BETTER! I could take them off the site any time I wanted to. But why? It showed how good a l33t web­mas­ter I was.

I WAS A FLASHY GIF GOD!!!
;)

by Gary on September 15, 2004 at 10:40 am. Reply #

Did you hap­pen to have the oblig­a­tory run­ning dog or spin­ning email icon?

I remem­ber one of my sites had a elec­tric surge ani­ma­tion that extended from one side of the page to the other. At the time I thought it was the great­est gift to web design. That is until I found out about Flash and made those blink­ing, spin­ning and pop­ping animations.

by kartooner on September 15, 2004 at 11:35 am. Reply #

You guys are killing me! I too had the lit­tle ani­mated email enve­lope that sprouted wings and started to fly away.….ah…memories. I think I saw one of those the other day.

by Chad on September 15, 2004 at 12:17 pm. Reply #

I’m too ashamed of the first con­cep­tion of my site to share it. I might share them though.. just for the laughs.

by Fernando Dunn II on September 15, 2004 at 6:07 pm. Reply #

I’ve got some web­sites to share if you’re really determined…

an unthink­able entry

Now, the text is in Pol­ish, but most of the links lead to the sites. If 1) a page is linked 2) it looks awful it was made by me long time ago.

by Jarek Piórkowski on September 15, 2004 at 8:27 pm. Reply #

Okay, okay…let’s get it all out in the open…

Hands up all those tha started play­ing with Flash and ended up mak­ing movie like titles (fade in/fade out text) for a site intro…YES I HAD A SPLASH PAGE ONCE! I’m man enough to admit it. I’ve seen the light and dis­like Flash now.

fade in

WELCOME

fade out

fade in

YOU HAVE FOUND

fade out

fade in

GPSHEWANDOTCOM!

Mebbe even flash and throb and throw in 2001: A Space Odessy type music

Man I just needed the cre­ative world to dis­cover me…I had a nat­ural gift :D

Unfor­tu­nately I have a bet­ter half that likes to encour­age me in any­thing I do (“Yes dear that’s nice”) but I thank­fully had one lucid moment where I asked her “This is really crap isn’t it?” and thank­fully (for both of us I guess) she said “Yup…all of it…rubbsh”.

by Gary on September 16, 2004 at 12:50 am. Reply #

You had to rip off the drum sounds from Akira for your intro Flash movie, too (à la Gabo­corp)… don’t for­get that!

Also, where are the oblig­i­tory poetry links?! Every web designer worth his salt was also a poet in those days…

by max on September 16, 2004 at 9:44 am. Reply #

Gary: Oh man, that brought back a lot of self-induced Flashbacks.

Max: Animé drum loops were the cream of the crop. I faintly remem­ber rip­ping the theme from Final Fan­tasy VII. As for poetry, yes I too can admit to using it at one time or another.

by kartooner on September 16, 2004 at 10:06 am. Reply #

One word, two syl­labuls… TRIPOD.

Yes friends, you can catch me on Tri­pod — the writ­ing and design could only be matched by the likes of a 12 year old… using HOMETOWN AOL Tem­plates. It was sad. What’s even worse, is the fact that I will look back in 5 years at my cur­rent site and laugh just as hard.

by Donnie on September 17, 2004 at 2:46 am. Reply #

Don­nie: I never set up shop at Tri­pod. I used Geoc­i­ties for a cou­ple years before scroung­ing up enough money to pur­chase this domain (in 2000). I think at that time it was $50–70 a year com­pared to the pen­nies that domain reg­is­tra­tion costs today.

I think as a per­sonal project, I’m going to take the orig­i­nal (albeit cleaned up) code from EMWare Pro­duc­tions and make it stan­dards compliant.

by kartooner on September 17, 2004 at 9:08 am. Reply #

My first one was Dakota’s Room, fea­tur­ing a car­toon char­ac­ter of mine. I made it in col­lege and it slowly evolved into what you see today.

by wonderdog on September 21, 2004 at 5:59 pm. Reply #

Appar­ently I’m still learning…sigh…

by wonderdog on September 21, 2004 at 6:01 pm. Reply #

Leave your comment

Required.

Required. Not published.

If you have one.