This post is my contribution to the June 2025 IndieWeb Carnival, themed "Take Two" and hosted by Nick Simson.
Throughout my over three decades of life, I have had various interests。 However, there is an interest that was technically lifelong, but I did not explore as much as I could in the early days, so it took a second chance later in my life to do so — that interest was web design.
My history with web design went as far back as in the 2000s, when I was a teenager in secondary school. At the time, blogs were on the rise, and I was introduced to the concept of blogs by a local student magazine. As a result, blogging was my first foray into creating on the web.
I tried different blogging platforms, but one thing they all had in common was allowing users to customise their blog themes, and allowing users to add blog widgets. That was also when I got introduced to web design, including HTML and CSS. As a teen, I did not learn HTML and CSS enough to have coded an entire web page or blog theme from scratch, but I enjoyed tweaking the code to my liking.
Almost as soon as I began to learn HTML and CSS as a teen blogger, I was enamoured by the two coding languages and web design. I found web design and development a fascinating combination of words, art and technology.
I never consider art and science at odds with each other, because since childhood I was interested in both: drawing has been a lifelong hobby of mine, but I had a childhood phase where science was my main special interest; then while I chose to study science stream subjects in secondary school, at the same time I aspired to become a graphic designer, and thus pursuing a diploma in graphic design after graduating from secondary school.
In fact, I was inspired to pursue graphic design as a profession by a Taiwanese blogger named Book, whom I followed during my 2000s teenage blogging era, and more recently, I happily found out that Book still blogs regularly on boo2k.com, focusing on travelling.
Book was a professional web designer whose blog during the 2000s included a gorgeous header made with Flash. Unfortunately, resources for learning to code to become a professional web designer or developer were not as accessible and easy to find as they are today, and I did not know anyone working in tech to know how to break into the web design or web development field either. As a result, when I learned about graphic design as a professional field, I set my goal to become a graphic designer instead, before even graduating from secondary school.
I mistakenly assumed that pursuing graphic design would allow me to get involved in web design, but that ended up not being the case. After years of working in the graphic design field, I got burned out. There were multiple factors contributing to my burnout from graphic design as a profession, but the short version is that the reality of graphic design work, at least in my experience, did not turn out as great as what my younger self had expected and hoped for.
Fast-forward to 2022, my interest in web design was rekindled when I discovered Neocities and the resurgence of creating personal websites, so I decided to build and code my own website from scratch for the first time. For this, I re-learned HTML and CSS, and was amazed by how much HTML and CSS have evolved since the 2000s.
Rediscovering web design by coding and designing my personal website for the first time in the early 2020s cemented the fact that what I truly was interested in and passionate for, was web design, not graphic design. Reviving my passion for web design gradually inspired my interest in programming, to the extent I decided to pursue web development, especially after hearing stories about other software developers getting their developer jobs without a computer science degree. I did end up getting my first developer job in August 2024 after spending almost two years to teach myself web and software development, and even though the job did not last long, leaving the job gave me the free time to attend the 26-day bootcamp of my local campus of 42 the computer science school, study hard and work hard in my projects, which led to me passing the bootcamp.
The further I learned web development and tech, the more I realised that pursuing a graphic design career was the biggest mistake I made for my life. While I appreciate that my background in graphic design provided design skills that allowed me to transition to web design and web development, I deeply regretted my teenage self's ignorance for assuming graphic design work involved web design as well.
That said, I am grateful for getting the opportunity to rediscover my passion for web design that was never fully utilised before. My second chance in diving into web design has opened up the door for me to discover the indie web, connect with other like-minded people who are also passionate about making the web better, get my first job in a new field, and back to a school to study a different field from my previous occupation.
Our life itself does not have a take two, but when we are alive, we can choose to revisit some things in our life, and gain a new experience from it.
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