Me |
As you may have guessed, my name is Teddy Wing. I'm a web designer, podcaster, filmographer and film editor, musician, and avid Mac user living in San Francisco. I collect applications, icons, pictures, podcasts, and anything else on the web that interests me.
I've been coding websites for many years, and have been hand-coding XHTML and CSS sites since 2006. When I originally started building websites, I was taught how to do some basic HTML coding. Then I moved on to the powerful WYSIWYG editor known as Macromedia Dreamweaver. I believe it was version 4 in those days. I stuck with Dreamweaver until after version 8, and decided that I would hand-code a website.
I had learned about hand-coding using CSS online, and felt that I had enough knowledge of Cascading Style Sheets to redesign BowlerDerby using a text editor instead of Dreamweaver. It was a bit difficult at first, but not at all impossible. I relied on an example CSS page to figure out which attributes to use, but soon enough I got to the point where I didn't need any such thing to make a website.
If you want to ask about any of the websites I've created, please feel free to visit the contact page.
This website |
I created this website to share various items from my portfolio with the world. And having a site with my name on it couldn't hurt. This site was the result of many hours of hard work trying to find something that really worked well. A blend of sophistication and simplicity seemed to stem from my efforts to find the right logo, and the right layout for the site.
You can read more about what inspired me throughout the course of this site's creation in the Inspiration section.
If you enjoy this website and would like to support it, please consider donating to support my hosting bills.
Recommended |
I've gotten to know many places on the web. Here are a few that I enjoy the most.
I host my websites on a DreamHost account, and so far they've been very reliable. They are transparent with what's going on there, and the amount of features they offer in their plans is amazing! To sign up with me as your referrer, simply click here.
The IconBuffet is a fun community where people collect and share icons. The game aspect of it is nice, and many of the iconsets are absolutely gorgeous. If you consider signing up, click the button to the right to give me 50 points for refering you.
Inspiration |
Inspiration comes in many forms, and there were many things that inspired me before and during the creation of this website. Initially, the main inspiration for the site long before I even bought the domain name was a paper clip bended and contorted to look like a T and a W. I laid out a site design in my mind, hoping to pursue it once I had the logo ready. The site had a grayscale colour composition, with rounded corners and a separated header. I drew out my design on paper, but later decided I might like an all-Flash website.
So, I thought about it, and drew out a new design to be used with Flash, inspired by the green desk pad I had been working on. The loading page would have my paper clip logo in the center, and some kind of loading bar animation. From there, you would see my desk pad, with the logo in the middle of it, boxed in with square borders. The background I decided should be some sort of dark red wood, well shadowed on the outside. On the right side would be a group of folder tabs which would slide out when you clicked on them. From here, you would see the inside of a folder as the immediate background, and behind this the main page background. Content would be overlaid onto the folder. I decided to start with porting my logo over from paper clip form to digital form.
It was about this time that I talked with a good friend about my logo, and showed him what I had begun to do in terms of its creation, and what inspired it originally. When I had finished, he simply said something to the effect of 'It looks like a P'. I resisted the comment at first, but later I realized, that yes, it did look like a 'P'. PW. So, I started on a two- or three-week journey, my Moleskine by my side drawing out possible logos for the website. Many times I had thought I had it, but realized a day or two later that I didn't like what I had. Then found one that I thought was 'good enough'. Three days later more designs came to me, and some were brainstormed without the Moleskine, on a small pad of paper. There had been an element from some of the logo designs that I really liked for the 'w', but the 't' never looked quite right. Finally, I had found the one! A simple, lower-case 't'.
Several days later I decided not to make a Flash website, but I would instead make an HTML site because one made in Flash would take me longer to produce. I had no idea what this site would look like until one day, and unexpected object caught my eye. I had been looking for a new suitcase for a while now, trying to replace the cheap, red, easily identifiable, temporary one I had been using. The year before we had gone to the Mandarina Duck shop in the Marais in Paris and taken a look their suitcases. The small Work Bag really appealed to me, so this time we traveled, we decided to go back and replace my suitcase with the partially-broken zipper. Well, the black Work Bag was a little big, but it was such a nice suitcase, and we decided to take it. When we got back to the place, I looked at the handle inscribed with the words and logo, MANDARINA DUCK, and opened the inside pocket. Part of the pocket was a nice orange colour, just like the colour of the logo on the handle. And then it hit me. Black and orange would be a *perfect* colour composition for my site!
When I got back I set out to work on digitizing my logo design. But there was one problem: I didn't have the layout of the site together. That didn't bother me though, and I decided that first I should complete the logo, and then I could get the design together. During the three weeks or so I spent working on the logo off and on, I found a couple websites that interested me for the layout of the site. The first was a site called Infinise Design, and the second was a site I knew about earlier, from the designer David Lanham. Infinise Design served as my primary inspiration for the Portfolio page, with its small content boxes.
I was close to finishing the logo, and was continuing to make some final adjustments, and decided to carry a set of notecards with me at all times in case sudden inspiration struck. I jotted down various designs, but none of them seemed quite right. Then one day I drew one up that had a simple but effective design. That was the one. The only problem was that once I had finished the sketch, a mockup formed in my head, and the colour scheme that was inspired from the Mandarina Duck bag vanished. It had to be a subtle blue background with a red navigation bar across the whole browser window. When I finished up my logo I decided to keep the orange because it added a nice touch to the site. So, at least part of the Mandarina inspiration lives on.
Once I had my design and my logo, I jumped into Fireworks to create a mockup which I refined in Photoshop. A couple weeks and a few hundred lines of code later and here it is. teddywing.com