Marc Coupland
Rolling release

A WIP I'll never finish writing - Orignal Title: i learnt design. (kinda?)

Prelude to the predule

This was originally going to be a whole article about how I redesigned my website off the back of taking Jack McDade's Radical Design Course (which is really great btw!), but I never actually finished writing it. I decided I would like to publish what I did write anyway, so below you will find what I did write - in it's incompleted glory!

You'll have noticed this site's design is not "Radical" by any means. That's because I undid my Radical Design and made it boring again (sorry Jack McDade) because I still wasn't happy with the site. Here are some screenshots of what it did look like however!

Radical Home Radical Articles Radical Article

From here on out you'll be reading the original article!


Well... I learnt how to poorly rip off Jack McDade at least. So should you: https://radicaldesigncourse.com

Prelude

So, last iteration of this site I dropped this banger of a post (i really need to learn design) which lamented the fact that I didn't have a competent designing bone in my body - and went over how all I wanted was a decent personal website.

Some time after that Jack McDade released his Radical Design Course, and boy after that intro video - I was hooked. I felt like this was exactly what I needed, something that could help me change the way I think about design, rather than a tutorial for some design software (which is all I'd ever looked at before). I'm paraphrasing here, but one of the most important things I learnt from the course was that you don't need a hard and fast set of requirements and a rigid process to design successfully - you need to kinda be "loosey goosey" with it, have fun with it, and learn to enjoy  it.

Anyway, I'm not even done with the course (yet) - I've watched less than half the content so far. BUT even that has empowered me to create this site, which I know isn't some groundbreaking piece of design work, but is infinitely better than anything I've ever created before.

Now I do want to note that by trade I'm a backend developer, I'm not (by any stretch of the imagination) a frontend guy - so, the implementation may be a bit off, but I'm happy with it and that's what matters.

That said, I will be incrementally improving and updating the site as I pick up new tips and tricks, and just iterating on what I've got here already, until I think I've got something truly great (by my standards).

Inspiration

Colours & the stripes

All based on my riding goggles!

Font(s)

The "archive"

Article view

It's just tailwind typography plugin with a couple tweaks. I was inspired by not having to style entry content myself.

Statamic 😍

Not only did I (kinda) rip off Jack McDade's designs - by using Statamic I had him do most of the work too! For real though, if you're making a custom blog - why aren't you using Statamic? There's absolutely no reason not to, literally cannot think of one.

What's next

A brief summary:

  • Understand & implement Bard
    • The content layout on here is still boring! and I know  Bard can change that!
  • Play with more colours
    • It has been pointed out to me that this site kinda looks like the German flag

Times I said "Jack McDade" in this article (excluding just now): 5