ElyseKufeldt.com's "story" really begins in 1997 when I created my first website
at age nine on some terrible website generator. I loved the fact that I could publish whatever I wanted online, and loved even more the idea of having artistic freedom in ways that I didn't have it when holding a pencil or crayon. Granted, at the time, my websites were horrible and didn't even qualify as designs, but the interactive web and I were both still young.
Three years later I created my first site using html, six months later I had bought and was learning Jasc Paint Shop Pro VII. A year after that, I taught myself css as well. I was blogging using greymatter all over the place in various different locations. I loved the fact that what I created could be online and presented the way I wanted it to.
At 16, I opened my first public blog, though did not release it to family or very many friends. It was one of the first three blogs admitted to the teen blogging network Random Shapes and over the two years I ran it, housed some of my proudest articles. On Reaching Maturity, I grew as a writer and used it as a tool to investigate myself. I closed it after my senior year amidst much family drama, needing to get away from blogging for a while and feeling as though that chapter of my life had run its course.
This website is the first that I have created with plans in mind to release it to friends and family. My now defunct plans to go to Irkutsk, Russia for a year was just a convenient reason to do so. The truth is, I have been trying to muster the courage to do this for the last three years, to be able to write unencumbered and not worry what my parents or family would think if they found the place. With this, however, my writings will likely not be as personal as Reaching Maturity was. I talk a lot about how I'm a very private person, and this is true, no matter how incongruous my online blogging may seem to that fact. There is a large difference between blogging for strangers and blogging for people you know. Each is restricting in their own way. But trying to hide yourself on the web while you're also trying to publicize yourself is extremely difficult, so I've chosen to blog with family and friends in mind. Which means certain details of my life that might have been included on Reaching Maturity won't be included here.
The Design
This is technically version 4.0. Version 1.0 was directed at colleges I was applying to, while version 2.0 was my attempt at simplicity. Both of those designs did not reflect me. Version 3.0 was a rekindling of my love for design by using rich imagery as a base as I had done so much in the past.
Version 4.0, however, is a much more simplistic approach. I tackled this design out of a desire for a concept that was focused on clear, quality typography. It took roughly ten prototype sketches at various stages of development and three coding attempts before landing on this. I am pretty happy with it, and it feels nice to finally have my online presence's design problem
at least temporarily solved.
