Designing your own website, even when you design lots of sites for others, is really hard. I think it’s even harder to design your own as a designer because you always know all the possibilities. You’ve seen it all and then some. You look at another designer’s portfolio and see elements in their designs that are so interesting you have to incorporate them. You want to do everything, even though that’s not practical at all. So, even though I should have redesigned this website a year or more ago, I never did. I had analysis paralysis. I was never going to get it exactly right, so I never started. Then, finally, I realized that I had to start. Even if I changed it every other week, I had to start somewhere.
So, yeah, that blotch of red up there probably could be interpreted as a blood splotch. I suppose, if I were inclined to give artistic philosophies to my work, I would say that I chose to demonstrate that doing good design can hurt. Or I could say it was a comment on having to be on the “bleeding edge” of technology, a phenomenon that I find obnoxious and bothersome. But, really, the real reason it’s there is because I wanted to add a touch of red, saw that, and really liked it. Sometimes good design is that simple: you like it.