Paul Webb DSGN has under­gone a myr­iad of changes, changes that most peo­ple are unaware of. As my skills have improved, so has my intense dis­like of what­ever site design I had at the time.

So, I guess you could say my site has grown up with me, in just 3/4 short years. Thanks to such won­der­ful mem­bers of the design com­mu­nity, I have been able to teach myself tips, tricks, tech­niques, etcetera so this page is both my ret­ro­spec­tive and case study … on myself!

/ First Ver­sion

For this design, I def­i­nitely wanted to do some­thing new. I felt as if web­sites based upon grids were bor­ing and inex­pres­sive so I took a more abstract approach.

As you’ll see with the later site incar­na­tions, I have a thing with con­trast [that I just noticed now!].

/Second Ver­sion

When I made this ver­sion, I was doing a lot of things with pas­tel col­ors and decided to base a site design around “stickers”.

This site actu­ally did not last very long because there were weird errors in IE that frus­trated me to no end. I deemed this a failure.

/ Third Ver­sion

This ver­sion never went live but I was work­ing on it around the same time I was get­ting sick of the sec­ond ver­sion. Around this time, I was get­ting into min­i­mal­ism in web design and found it fascinating.

The whole, “less-is-more” thing was get­ting pop­u­lar and a lot of design­ers I look up to were doing it so well.

/ The Tran­si­tion [or] Fourth Ver­sions

Okay, let this “Under Con­struc­tion” be your guide on how *not* to uti­lize a place­holder on your site. Seriously.

There is absolutely no other infor­ma­tion about me what­so­ever, not even sam­ples of my work and you only see a con­tact link. Best way to waste hard drive space and money on your server.

I real­ized this after hav­ing it up for a few weeks and wanted to run into a wall. *shakes head* Just imag­ine the poten­tial clients, lost for­ever … meh, you live and learn right?

How­ever, the sec­ond ver­sion of my “Under Con­struc­tion” place­holder showed per­son­al­ity and most impor­tantly, links to my other portfolios/profiles that are hosted elsewhere.

In addi­tion, there was a down­load link to my resume.

/ Fifth Ver­sion

There’s a funny thing about this one … I was ready to start cod­ing this after I pre­viewed it to @saralwin and @ddrdark and scrapped it two days later.

The rea­son? I real­ized that I wanted to have a blog, to try and show my per­son­al­ity, and be able to con­tin­u­ously update my site and this par­tic­u­lar design would not have allowed that.

How­ever, with this design I was get­ting into typog­ra­phy a lot and research­ing as much as I could about it and how to imple­ment it prop­erly into web design.

Of course, since I have the PSD, I might as well code it and release it either free or rel­a­tively cheap on Envato’s Marketplace.

Well, that was my ret­ro­spec­tive on the past iter­a­tions of Paul Webb DSGN.

I believe every­one should do one of these because I def­i­nitely learned some things about myself.

For exam­ple, how the major ver­sions of the designs reflected and coin­cided with my inter­est in var­i­ous aspects of web design.

What you are view­ing right now is the sixth ver­sion [although I refer to it as V5 because the one before it was never live], enti­tled “Technicolor”.

The front page was inspired by a crappy Motorola pre­paid cell­phone I had.

I had one of those “aha!” moments when the con­cept formed in my mind. I built this from scratch, learned how to slice a Pho­to­shop doc­u­ment, and code it.

Dif­fi­cult as hell for the first try but fun at the same time. I also decided to inte­grate this site with Word­press. I was used to Expres­sion Engine but I believe that you should be com­fort­able with more than one CMS and so far, Word­press is work­ing out for me.

Hope­fully you’ve learned some­thing inter­est­ing or at least got a glimpse at my thought process. Be sure to check out my Jour­nal for my lat­est mus­ings on beau­ti­ful archi­tec­ture, inte­rior design, cloth­ing, and what­ever else I find.