A digital business card (2016)

As part of the process of publicly launching my macOS app Coffee Buzz, I needed to stand up a website to support my product. Early plans to buy a dedicated domain fell through, and I ended up just hosting that site in a subdomain of aaronpantling.com, which I had recently registered.

But what to do with the main domain? Outside of one app and a couple pieces of unremarkable music, I didn't yet have much to show or promote. Even though my homepage didn't need to be fancy, I knew I needed to start building a personal brand. But I had no idea what kind of visual identity I wanted to craft.

Thankfully, it didn't take long to find the inspiration I needed. One night that summer on a family vacation, we were all sitting in a restaurant, waiting for dinner. With nothing handy to pass the time, my brothers and I resorted to a pen-and-paper game on a napkin, and instead of drawing our dots and boxes in the typical square grid, I decided to try a triangular one instead. Sadly, the novel grid shape made it nearly impossible to actually score in the game, but because of that, an organic-yet-mathematical structure emerged on the page. Our food arrived before we could finish the game, but even the little sliver we had was the coolest thing I had seen in a while.

Back home, I recreated the pattern in my custom design software, extending it above and below to create the stripe that dressed the page and would adorn the physical business cards I ordered for myself shortly afterward. This same concept, distilled to its essence, also revealed the first version of my forward-facing personal logo.

Showcasing my creative work (2018)

A few years later, in one of my technical courses in college, I was given the assignment to create some kind of moderately complex web application. Instead of putting together a silly demonstration thing that would only ever run on the school's web servers at best, I decided to create a personal gallery, with behavior similar to a site like ArtStation, that I could use to present some of my photographic work up to that point.

Using the skills I was building to their full capability, I packed the app with a ton of interactive features. State and history management, full screen, asynchronous HTTP requests to load heavy full-resolution images, and so on. This was also my first attempt at creating a simple content management system that I could use to edit the content displayed by the app without having to touch any of the HTML. The design I came up with worked, but it was very awkward to rearrange or modify any of the content after setting it up for the first time. I added a bit of new content to the gallery after finishing it, but mostly I just left the whole thing alone.

Expanding my foothold on the internet (2026)

Years later, I was finally ready to begin building a serious presence online and attempting to attract an audience for my work. It was also high time to establish a proper archive of everything I've done, and with the sheer breadth of material I've explored so far, no existing platform online would be a suitable place for all of it. Rather than scatter my work, I decided to build a brand-new personal site from scratch to properly tell the story of everything I've made.

Now that I have large amounts of creative work that (hopefully) speaks for itself, I went with a much more neutral visual identity for the container. I chose a relatively modern, yet abstract look, juxtaposing hard contrast and solid shapes in front of a soft grayscale background. Applying lessons learned from my previous web-development work, I created a fairly robust image-gallery system that will allow me to easily add and rearrange content in the future.

Like basically everything else I've done, I vastly underestimated the amount of work it would take for this. Surprisingly, though, most of that work was editorial, not strictly technical. Documenting the last fifteen years of my life was not a simple task, but it was a ton of fun to look back through those early projects and put together some proper exhibits for them.

I've built this new site with an eye for the future. As I continue to grow, it'll grow with me.