Loose Ends

I started building dashboards on a hidden page of my portfolio site. It was a Squarespace instance, which was fine for a portfolio and increasingly not fine for the thing I actually wanted to do — which was write code, break it, and see what happened. Every experiment ran into the edge of the platform before it ran into the edge of the idea.

So I built somewhere else to put them.

Loose Ends is a workshop. Design work that needs its own coding environment, web animation and interaction experiments, dashboards, and eventually longer-form writing that gets to have its own design instead of living inside someone else's template. It's not a portfolio. A portfolio is finished work chosen to make a case. This is the other thing — the trying.

The distinction matters to me more than it probably should. My portfolio site is where completed work goes to be evaluated. That's a useful room, and I've been putting real effort into it lately. But I needed a second room where the standard is lower and the point is different. Somewhere failure isn't a disappointment, it's just Tuesday. Most of what I try won't pay off. If it does, lovely. If it doesn't, at least I know something I didn't know before, and that seems like enough to justify the afternoon.

I'll be honest about where the name comes from. My brain moves fast and generates more ideas than it finishes, which is a polite way of describing a fairly significant case of ADHD. Some days that's the best tool I own. Some days it means I'm surrounded by threads I never tied off. Loose Ends felt accurate.

You'll notice, if you click around, that there isn't much here yet.

I thought about that for a while. The instinct is to wait — build up a body of work, launch with substance, make a strong first impression. But waiting until it's impressive is exactly the reflex that keeps experiments sitting on my local machine indefinitely. The whole point of this place is that the work doesn't have to be impressive to exist. Applying a different standard to the site itself would be a little absurd.

So it's public early, and it'll fill in as it fills in. Reverse chronological, no curation, no attempt to make the story look tidier than it is.

If you're a designer with similar interests, some of this might be useful. If you're evaluating me professionally, I'd rather you see that I'm still learning than see a frozen highlight reel. And if you're me, six months from now — this is the record. Proof the ideas got out of the drawer occasionally.

Sometimes the trying is enough.