Next week I'm going to be launching my third website designed and hosted on Squarespace, and I thought it might be worthwhile to write a quick review of my experience, as a non-web-designer, with the service. This is a rambling, self-indulgent post, so please excuse me.

Some background: Years ago while in school I made a conscious decision not to pursue web design as my area of study. At the time it seemed like there were three main directions one could go in the Graphic Design department at SVA- web, print, or motion. Print was (is) slowly dying, and while I certainly enjoy the geekier elements of the internet, I'm pretty miserable with regards to coding and syntax– something I would consider an essential skill for web. For me, motion design was the natural choice. It allowed me to play with technology I was comfortable with (video), and had a promising future since it didn't depend on any one medium. But web would always be there, hovering. The internet is a big place, and when you come down to it, every single page out there has to be designed to some degree.  That's a lot of potential client work. Nonetheless, I've never felt like I'm missing out on money. I did, however, feel like I was missing out on self-promotion. The internet has become the de facto stomping grounds for freelancers and entrepreneurs of all types. This is where I began to fall short.

Despite my shortcomings with web design (or rather, my blatant decision not to learn anything about it), I still maintained several sites either out of necessity, or just as a hobby. They were all shoddily-built (eh-hem, Dreamweaver) and lacking any of the polish I would typically like to see from my designs. They all followed the "oh well, it works" school of design. In recent years my interest in updating these pages had waned, knowing the result would be a disappointment. 

Last fall I started to plan my NYC Grid project. In its earliest stages I still wasn't sure what form it would take - photos? podcast? written blog? After eventually settling on a photoblog, I knew I would need a fairly traditional blog engine to power it. I've never been a tremendous fan of templated sites, so popular players like Blogger and Wordpress weren't looking too good. It wasn't until last year that I began to play with Squarespace out of sheer curiosity. It was an impressive system- but what sold it for me was the balance it struck between WYSIWYG design, and the ability to edit small snippets of code to get the results you want- all while keeping things (almost) perfect across all browsers. After signing up I began the task of editing a template until I had a design I felt would best serve the site. In November I launched NYC Grid, with the (admittedly) ambitious goal of documenting one city block every single weekday. Each post would include 20-30 photos, a Google map, and a brief write-up. Even though I had already spent a few weeks designing Grid, it wasn't until I began these regular postings that I got very familiar with the service.

Now, 11 months into the project, I've probably spent as much time on Squarespace software at night as I do AfterEffects during the day.

After about 5 months of working on Grid, I decided it would be a good time to update my personal portfolio site (previously designed as a super-simple HTML situation) to Squarespace. This is where I really began to see the service's strengths and weaknesses. While NYC Grid was as much a learning experience as it was a design exercise, redesigning my personal site was vastly different. Not only were its needs completely new, but I demanded a bit more out of myself this time. My goal was to create a simple, no-frills site that would act as my home-base on the internet. I wanted people to be able to explore all aspects of my "personal brand" (as Gary Vaynerchuk would like to say) while still focusing on my core competencies (graphic design and motion graphics). As a result, I ended up with a dead-simple 3-page setup. Using some subtle Squarespace trickery, I was able to create unique page-specific description boxes. In the end, it was almost exactly as I had imagined. I was beginning to realize just what Squarespace was and wasn't capable of- and as a result, the planning stages of my designs began to conform to that.

Unlike using Dreamweaver, or other antiquated web packages, the strength of Squarespace lies in its template system, which more-or-less guarantees that each page of our site will match the last…pixel for pixel. It also offers a level of nuanced control that you normally only see in the likes of Photoshop and Illustrator. However, these controls come at a cost- most notable flexibility. While the tool and feature set offered is quite vast, if you want to do something outside the scope of that toolset, you may find yourself cursing their name more times than you'd care to admit. Software like Wordpress prides itself on being expandable and open, while Squarespace is a completely closed system. At the end of the day, you're at the whim of the company. When they make a change to the core service, it affects all users. This can be a worrisome thought, especially when your site is your livelihood. Though with more and more of our digital lives existing in the cloud, I think it's a modus operandi that many of us are getting used to.

Earlier I mentioned that I had made several sites over the years out of necessity. Of those, Iconize Me is the only one to live through to today. Started in 2001 as a simple caricature service, Iconize Me is now celebrating it's eighth year. There's now two other illustrators in addition to myself, and the site has really begun to show its age. Finally feeling rather confident using Squarespace, I set forth to create a brand new version of the site that would fix all the short-comings of the old one. While I would still never consider myself a web designer, Squarespace had now become a piece of software I was comfortable using. I felt like I had some degree of control over the outcome– something I never felt with Dreamweaver (or iWeb, or anything else). While there were still shortcomings to contend with, the majority of the design process was a refreshing experience that was much closer to something you'd experience with print.  

I realize this entire post sounds like one long shill for Squarespace – but really I'm just surprised how much my views towards web design has changed in the past year as a result of designing these three sites. And for what it's worth, I'm not pretending these are the greatest sites ever made- they're not. Hell, NYC Grid is down-right ordinary. But for me – a non-web-designer – to be able to create a website that even resembles my original vision, is nothing short of incredible.