It’s probably not gone unnoticed that this site was overhauled just two months after its previous incarnation, and I feel an explanation is in order.
The Problem
I’m going to coin another phrase, and I call it Designer’s Obsessive-Compulsive Attention Deficit Disorder; DOCADD for short. But I’m not just the discoverer of DOCADD, I’m also a victim.
Since its launch in December of 2000, this site has gone through 16 significant structural and/or aesthetic revisions, which averages out to about 3 per year. Which, in the designer world, isn’t totally unheard of until you consider that nearly half of them occurred in 2005 alone. I could make excuses by claiming that 8.0 (01/05) was when the CSS conversion happened, and then 8.5 (05/05) was for the Reboot, and then 9.0 (06/05) was the short-lived WordPress test site. Then we’ve got the three different versions of 10 (the white one, the brown one, and the black one) and the recently deceased (good riddance) version 11. That’s a total of seven.
I relaunched my site seven times last year.
That is obsession verging on the edge of insanity. Then let’s consider all the tiny updates that happened in between the major relaunches, like the color and sizing adjustments and just general code modifications and you’re up to probably close to a hundred different versions of the site over a year which works out, amazingly, to a new release almost every three days.
So the question is, why? Why do I put so much time into this website? I don’t know. I know when I’m updating why I’m doing it but I think part of it goes back to DOCADD. I can almost guarantee that I have ADD when it comes to things like this, and I start thinking about ways to make it better because after seeing it day after day it starts to bore me, something that indicates bad design. And that spurs me to start thinking about the next version. The OCD kicks in when I notice little niggling details, like incorrect spacing or inconsistent date formats, or when I think of things that could just be displayed better.
The Resolution
Because I think I have (finally, though I say that all every time) arrived at a design that I think has some staying power, I’m making the resolution to keep this site in its current iteration for six months. 180 days. That means that yellow header will be my best friend until August 22, at least. It probably won’t happen, but we’ll see. I can’t shouldn’t keep this up.