Despite being told time and again that I lack digital media design industry experience, I have been designing websites for over half my life, so here's where I do my jolly gosh darn best to convince you that yes, I can actually design a website.

Every site I design, I challenge myself with it, because I love to learn. Before you ring me back after our interview to tell me you went with someone who has more digital media design industry experience, I will ask if you saw my websites, all designed on my own, without a team of programmers and code monkeys behind me. Upon viewing them and my decade of print design industry experience, I will ask what you think I'm lacking. not at all to be facetious but to learn. I will ask where I can learn what I'm lacking, and why I can't learn it in the first week or two working for you.

I've been pigeonholed as a print designer. I just need one person, one employer to recognise that the decade of professional print and the 20-odd years of personal web design can marry together to make a great professional web designer. I need one person to see that good design is good design.

Y'know what? That someone should totally be you.

Kate Hawtin

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Professional writer Kate Hawtin became my first freelance web design client after I'd designed and printed her business cards earlier that year. Her yellow typewriter was a key feature of the business cards, so it became the image around which her website was designed, influencing the yellow-and-dove-grey colourscheme.

The desktop design features scrolling, jQuery testimonials on the main page, customised scrollbars and an elegant, two-column text layout. The mobile version utilises a jQuery dropdown menu and clean, matching layout. Pending client approval, the full design will be converted to Wordpress so Kate can easily update the content herself in the future.

[Snapshot Henchman]

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GuildWars is an MMORPG that was at its height of popularity from 2005 through 2012 when GuildWars 2 was released. [Snapshot Henchman] is a gallery of screenshots first made in 2008. It came to my attention ten years later that people still visited the site, so I promptly got embarrassed by my very basic old layout and remade it.

The challenge of the shiny new layout was in the gallery, which I built with XML. I learned a method of creating the thumbnails from the XML file, then a second, separate method to scroll through images. I put the two together and voilà, XML galleries complete!

bloogum

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My very personal site, bloogum, which I first had gifted to me for my sixteenth birthday. This is the home for all my creative endeavours, mostly writing and illustration.

The main challenge I set myself for bloogum was less of a technical challenge, rather I pushed what I could do aesthetically. I took the currently in-vogue design concept of making everything just slightly off-kilter, something easy to do in print (just shift the box over a few millimetres in InDesign) but much more fiddly on the web. For the images/text boxes and their frames and background, each is a separate div positioned relative to the one before it.

Every page is a different layout built around the content of the page in question. It was a lot of fun designing each page, in particular the contact page and the Cork's Crew. I used the same XML gallery method as I made for [Snapshot Henchman], adding an easy extra jQuery feature to sort the fanart gallery by artist or by character.

Note External links to tpyo and FigJam are on the social media platform Dreamwidth and as such have restrictions on their layout. The DOM itself can't be edited, only styled with CSS, and external fonts (including Google fonts) can't be utilised. Still, I styled it as best as it would let me!