It belongs in a museum

October 23, 2023

Introducing the Museum: two decades of my screenshots, now searchable. It’s built with Astro, Svelte and Xata. I’m planning a follow up post with build details for those that might want to build their own.

---

One of my favorite movie scenes is the closing shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the titular McGuffin ends up not in a museum, but an indiscreet warehouse to be lost yet again. William Hootkins, who Star Wars fans will remember as “Porkins”, delivers the famous assurance to our hero that “Top Men” are looking after it. Nothing stays special when you zoom the camera far enough back.

Similarly every website I work on as a designer feels important during the gestalt of creation, but then immediately fades into obscurity once delivered. Time is not friendly to us web designers, and the embarrassment of old work is so common that design portfolios are carefully curated to only show selective peaks of a design, typically right before those perfect pixels were destroyed by the maddening irregularity of a browser. I can fault this style of portfolio intractability no more than I can any Greatest Hits record. That said, when we see only the best a person has to offer, we don’t get much insight into the process of how they got there. Every life, truncated to the just the hits, is by nature a pinnacle. I’m more interested in the journey up the slope.