I launched verycoolstudio.com five years ago, and have spent countless hours regretting just about every decision I made in engineering it. The pageload times were awful, it was difficult to update or add new fonts to, and the two of us fought like eagle gripping snake right up until I decided to drop it from several hundred feet in the air and eat a small bunny instead. I wish I was the snake in that metaphor but honestly I can’t figure out how the snake “wins” without it also losing.
When I started developing the site, oh, say, 2015, I was woefully out of touch with modern development, and Wordpress felt like the obvious choice. To me, it was the easiest, cheapest, option for an e-commerce site. The truth is, and probably was, that Wordpress is on its last leg, and the rest of the web is on version 5.0 (I think). So, the Wordpress plugins I used to assemble my little site have been getting less and less support from developers, and hackers have been catching up, and I’ve been just like sitting on the sidelines crying or something. IDK, I can’t keep up with all these web technologies. Long story short, I’ve been dealing with exploits that I don’t understand and can’t fix left and right.
There’s hardly a friend of mine who hasn’t texted to let me know that my site is again flashing banner ads.
A decade ago you could hardly host a font on your website, let alone make a good online store. But a lot has changed in the last decade. Content management systems are better, faster, easier. Website builders abound. And loads of great people are making a living creating bespoke font e-commerce platforms. And so, In the summer of 2019, tired of responding to support emails, I started looking into having my site engineered by somebody other than little old me. I started a few conversations but ultimately I didn’t follow through on any of them! This is a known bug. Please don’t send a support email about it.
If I’m sitting down and reviewing this with my therapist: I think I was scared to goof again. Sure, my website was giving me hell, but devil you know and all that. If I goofed once, couldn’t I goof again? And maybe harder, this time?
So the Figma files for Very Cool V2 sat and gathered dust, and the site continued to be a mess.
After the launch of Nudge, verycoolstudios.com got exploited again. I think via my contact form? IDK, php is confusing to me. It was embarrassing. I was pointing all these cool people to my website, where I’d written this nice article about the design process, and instead they were seeing bullshit and porn (and not in a cool way!). I needed a new website NOW, and the shame story I was telling myself about making exploitable websites wasn’t helping anyone!
One of my favorite artists, Lomelda, said something somewhere about how she’s always re-writing her songs. I think it was a reddit AMA. Someone was like “does this song reference that song”, and she was like “that song is that song. I just rewrote it.”
I love this kind of stuff. Here’s a similar Sally Rooney quote, from the City Arts & Lectures series here in SF:
“...artists in any genre, have basically the same themes and concerns forever…And the technique always has to be different, because otherwise you’d literally just be writing the same novel again and again...”
I love it. I love these kind of quotes that point out how cyclical and confusing creation can be. And I love how Sally Rooney talks about concerns and themes almost as synonyms. George Saunders believes a similar thing. Paraphrasing here, again, but George Saunders thinks we don't ever really grow out of our weakness, we just learn how to direct our weaknesses to the betterment of other people. ¹
Somewhere in the middle of this month, I watched the The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart and a bolt of lightning ran up my spine.
I mean, you should watch the doc. But if you can’t, because you’re like scared of bees or big hair or whatever, here’s my summary: the Bee Gees never stopped changing their technique. The concerns and themes were the same, but the technique was always changing. One bad website doesn’t make a bad website maker. If the Bee Gees could keep changing, so can I.
As a musician, I’m embarrassed to say that when the film ended I picked up my macbook over my guitar. But that’s how it happened! And I think we’re all better for it.
I burned some midnight oil to make this new website². Honestly, I'm like a B+ developer and never dreamed I could make something this good. I'm so fucking proud of myself! Hope you enjoy it too!