Website: Mystic Meets Maker

Overview

This site started after the recommendations of a few people over the last decade. I don't expect much from it, other than as a forcing function to surface my projects and my thoughts around them.

I have had the highly analytical training that would suggest I always have a well thought out plan for my online presence. The truth is: I don't have any plan. This is made in the spirit of The Field of Dreams: "If you build it, they will come."

Consider this my "Mystic Meets Maker" moment. I'm just a guy trying to figure out what he wants to do when he grows up.

Planning Questions

What are we trying to solve?

• Trying to get our voice out there to be shared with others

• Trying to get into the habit of "expressing" my work so that others can interact with it

• Also trying to do this in a way that is artistically fulfilling. Something that I am proud to look at + share with others

Why does it matter?

• It forces me to interact with a community

  
  

• It forces me to figure out how to express my ideas so that others can understand them

• It holds me accountable to a community of people, even if they aren't holding me explicitly accountable

What counts as success?

• Getting the website up

• Having it organized so that I can write blogs into it

• Having it organized so that I can share visual aspects of my projects

• A place where people can reach out to me

• Fulfilling design that I can accomplish through the use of a template + free images

• Some representation of the skills that I am capable of

Which customers are affected?

• Future customers that I would interact with

• Me

• People near me who want to know what it is I do, what my skills are

What is the cost of doing this instead of something else?

• I may not finish other systems this cycle

• I may not complete 30 x 500 by the end of this cycle

• I'll be a little distracted from the "start a distillery" project

Project Kickoff Questions

What do you want to learn?

I want to learn how to generate my own design / website and publish it with some of the newest tools on the market.

What is the greatest source of uncertainty or most important question you want to answer?

Greatest source of uncertainty is whether anyone will actually connect with my work once I start publishing it. But I first have to provide a space to publish it.

What is most likely to fail?

Most likely to fail by not knowing enough about Figma + Webflow + Midjourney/Dall-e to be able to link the entire project together in the space of time that I have left.

What needs to happen for this project to be considered successful?

The only thing that really needs to happen is that the website is up and has the pages that are listed in the original design.

What are the minimum results tha tyou need to achieve, or the "stretch goals" you're striving for?

Minimum results: Get the website up with the listed pages

Stretch goals: Do this with the aforementioned technology stacks

Post-Mortem Questions

What did you learn?

At the technical level, I learned how to set up a website within WIX and became more familiar with some of the tools that creators can use when establishing a place for a website. I also started to become somewhat familiar with Figma at a low level. I wouldn't call myself a designer by any stretch of the imagination, but it was fun dipping my toes into the brainstorming / design phase of a project.

I knew this beforehand, but I was surprised by how much of the initial design changed in just doing the work. I had to work around constraints in WIX, only to revert back to my original design (sometimes) when I learned how to use WIX a bit better.

I did overextend in my aspirations to learn how to use AI / Midjourney / ChatGPT in the process. A good goal for future would be to hold myself to only one new tool / skill at a time. It's too much to achieve everything, all at once.

What did you do well?

I was particularly good at altering the scope of the project. In the first few minutes of watching a designer use Midjourney + Figma, I knew that I wasn't going to be able to complete this project in the timeframe that I had set for it. I wasn't familiar enough with basic design principles and tools that tend to be shared across *all* design programs. There was no way I was going to be able to learn those *and* introduce an AI coworker into the workflow. Realizing this up front and changing the course of the project saved a lot of time and frustration.

What could you have done better?

One thing that I didn't consider was to watch various WIX tutorials on how to do certain things. I eventually came across some that were helpful for a particular feature, but I didn't think about doing that at the outset of the project like I did with Figma and Midjourney.

Notably, WIX appears to set itself up as a desktop-version first design pattern. Some of what I have read in the past suggests that mobile-first is a better approach. If I would have started there, I might not have made so many design choices that were difficult to fit into the mobile platform.

What can you improve for next time?

From a procedural standpoint, I could:

• Design using a mobile-first approach

• A new project needs to limit the introduction of new tools / skills.

From the perspective of, "how could I improve this in future projects":

• Hire someone to help redesign and set-up the page

• Optimize around different pieces of the website that are gaining more interaction as the people who are interested in it grows

• Set up a more formal contact management system and process (via Mailchimp, possibly?)

• Red-design with Midjourney / ChatGPT to grow my skill in those domains

Were the objectives achieved?

I wanted to have a public place where I could document my projects. This website helps me do that. I consider this project achieved.

What was the return on investment?

Time will tell. I think that this is a question that can only be answered in the long-term. My ultimate hope is that this helps others, and potentially leads to a broader, better community around creating and becoming.