Let me preface this by saying I'm not a designer.

While I can make individual bits of a site look good, and I'm actually pretty skilled with CSS/Sass, overall design completely escapes me. I can't come up with good designs, nor do I really understand *why* good designs are good. It's just not something I can do, which feels really weird to say. but it's true.

So, when I made the Surfboard site (that's the project's internal name), I hacked everything together and focused on the functionality, and later did a branding and responsive pass. I managed to make the site look quite nice, and made it scale well across sizes/devices despite being completely new to responsiveness. (I'm proud, okay? deal.)

After lots of me asking (in response to people loudly complaining that the UI doesn't have X feature, scale properly on Y device, and doesn't look as good as Z site), the company finally reached out to its UI contractor who does their design work. After a week or two, he sent a few mockups.

The mockups consisted of my existing design with a darker background, much better buttons, several different header bars (a different color) with different logo/text placements, and several restyled steppers. He also removed a couple of drop shadows and made some very minor styling changes (bold text, some copy edits). Oh, he also changed the branding colors. Nothing else changed. It's basically the same exact site but a few things look a little better. and the branding is different.

My intermediary with the designer asked for "any feedback before finalizing the designs" -- which I thought odd because he sent mocks for two out of the ten pages (nine plus a 404 page). (Nevermind most of the mocks showed controls from the wrong page...).

So, I typed up a full page of feedback. Much of it was asking for specifics such as responsive sizing on the new header layout, how the new button layout would work for different button counts, asking for the multitude of missing pages/components, asking why the new colors don't match the rest of our branding, etc. I also added a personal nitpick about flat-looking controls because I fucking hate them. Everything I wrote was very friendly and professional.

... His response was full of gems. Let me share a few.

1. "Everything about the current onboarding site looks like a complete after-thought." (After submitting a design basically identical to mine! gg!)

2. "Yes [the colors match our current branding]." (No. They don't. I checked. The dark grey is different, the medium grey is different, the silver is different, the light blue is different. He even changed the goddamn color of the goddamn LOGO for fuck's sake! How the fuck is that "matching"?!)

3. "Appreciate the feedback [re: overlapping colored boxes, aka 'flat'], design is certainly subjective. However, this is the direction we are going." (yet it differs from the rest of our already-redesigned sites you're basing this off. and it's ugly as shit. gg again :/)

4. "Just looked at the 404 page. It looks pretty bad, and reflects very poorly on the [brand name] brand. Definitely will make a change here!" (Hey! I love that thing. It's a tilted, dotted outline of a missing [brand product] entirely drawn with CSS. It has a light gray "???" underlay and some 404 text inside. Everyone I showed it to, coworkers and otherwise, loved it. "Looks pretty bad". fuck you.)

I know I shouldn't judge someone so quickly, but what the fuck. This guy reminds me of one of those pompous artists/actors who's better than everyone and who can never be wrong, even while they're contradicting themselves.

just.
asfjasfk;ajsg;klsadfhas;kldfjsdl.

!dev

Out of shower, I sit on bed staring at my phone cuz I don't know who to talk to. This is the shittiest stage of the lockdown. When you've bore your close friends, exhausted your "I'm gonna find new friends online" options, and now you're -I am- circling back to remind yourself of all the people who put you aside. Just making yourself sadder remembering how each one of them shared a lot of their life and feelings with you and then how easily they went like "Nope. Don't want to deal with you". Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that's everyone. Every friendship has a proper "distance" but I just don't know why some people are like asteroids. Or rather, their interests are. They come quick and crash your mental barriers and tell you everything there is to know about them but then something shinier catches their attention or they realize they actually won't be able to have you -me- as a sidepiece and then they just... Fuck off.
And I don't know, maybe they think I'll remember them as the one that got away, but sadly, they just become "another one" in a list that I can't remember past the last 5-6 of.

Anyways, I miss the days when I could sit next to a friend, or hug a friend, or just looking into someone's eyes from less than safe distant and seeing how the details of their face change as they speak, and how their emotions flow.

I'm tired of all the zoom and vc and...

I'm just tired. 😢

I was very young, but my grandma had picked up an old apple 2 with asteroids on a 3.5 in floppy (maybe 1990) and it was really the first time playing games that it occurred to me that I could make them. From then on, I decided that I wanted to work in a space where my imagination was unbound and I could build anything I wanted from the ground up without any help. I've matured a bit since then, but I still find that basic love every now and again when I'm not dealing with red tape or fixing bugs in other people's code.

Stir crazy, locked in the house for days..... drove me to make asteroids -1979 for my 404 page. I can't tell if that's a good thing or not?

apparently the chance of getting hit by an asteroid that nukes some large hole in the land or causes tsunamis everywhere is a lot more common than humans have seen lately

and asteroids come in chunks because they keep breaking up into smaller and smaller pieces until they finally disintegrate

and earth has had an awful lot of near misses the last 20 years so that means there's a bunch of chunks flying repeatedly though this solar system's gravity wells and we're playing Russian roulette every time, none the wiser

and it's not the asteroid itself that's really the problem though millions will die if one hits. it's that every time those things hit there's actual climate change

so then you'll have to survive sun block out, famines, and floods for like 2-5 years after

but the SPACEFORCE fired the guy responsible for planning for this due to DEI

how to win the game of geopolitics. know this information and hide it from the countries you want to die, wait for an asteroid, and they're unprepared and die. whoops wasn't us!

I read one article about an asteroid causing destruction 10+ years ago and now Google seems to think that I need to know about all the 180 million asteroids orbiting in the asteroid belt. And fill my news feed with facts about each one of them, and which ones could potentially wipe out life from Earth.

I hate this kind of profiling these companies do.