Learning to Walk Again
My latest site that I’ve been assembling over 2024 is my favorite interactive project of mine. I’d had wanted to make websites that are linear in navigation while pushing the limits of what Elixir stacks could do. My second site from 2023 did that by making pages with a higher complexity then my first website. That work got so large that this Summer I split it into two sites due to the subject being so different in nature. Stylistically my second site jumped around quite a bit as you page through it. This one works better.
The style gradually changes over the course of multi-page sections so that it doesn’t loose the uniform look. Yet it still offers variety of changing styles as it moves forward. While on vacation I picked up a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s book No Mud, No Lotus. It teaches that the way you deal with dukkha, symbolized by the mud, will provide the nutrients to birth a beautiful metaphorical lotus. In fact for good to come about it needs the mud to nourish it. I noticed that this was happening in my web design work. As I wrote about suffering my family was going through this more innocent optimistic childlike work was emerging at the same time.
It is a more personal piece to me as I started replacing some of the stock images with my own hand drawn art and lettering (such as the title heading.) It had to be more specific to the content this time around. Well over fifty poems were written with the better ones set to be interspersed between the short articles. The overlap stack allowed me to position illustrations around the stanzas on some of these pages.
I also have a use for this on an updated homepage I’ve been assembling that I hope to get up in a couple weeks. The angle of a poem matches the angle of my school hallway. I am excited about how it will evolve through out the rest of the year. My latest project for pay is working with a school teacher to sell some study books that he is currently in the process of making. This work dovetails nicely into what he wants to make.
Here is the overview of the page layouts as I have them now. You can start to see that the pages are gradually changing as you go through them. This idea will be built up as I continue to work with it easing the transitions between sections.
