Meet the designer
Last year, as I was nursing some ideas about having a digital sandbox of my own, I got in touch with Matthew Hollett. I had not yet met Matthew, but we had some mutual contacts, and a look at his design portfolio was enough to tell me a coffee chat would be worth it.
I wrote to him in August, introduced myself, and told him I was interested in having a website where could I post some things I wanted to write. I mentioned a revived blog, and a possible interest in a Substack, too. That would be fine, he said, but he cautioned he couldn’t take on another project until October or November.
Seeing as I was planning to clew up work around then before I retired in late November, the timetable sounded just fine.
On the Tuesday after my last day in the office, Matthew and I met for the first time at Bannerman Brewing on Duckworth Street in downtown St. John’s. Despite what its name implies, it is a grand place in the morning to get a coffee and have a meeting. I think Matthew and I chatted for a couple of hours that morning, back and forth from the website I had in mind to a whole manner of subjects and mutual enthusiasms. (The photo above by the way is of the two of us, at our latest Bannerman coffee and chat a couple of days ago.)
It was a fun chat, and we made a deal. Matthew started digging into the project when his schedule cleared. Designing websites is a side hustle for him — and so is writing. A published poet, Matthew was longlisted just a few weeks ago for the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards.
Not being in a hurry was a benefit, I think, and we hit our target of getting johngushue.com up and running in January.
It was a fun collaboration. I think I’m the rare client Matthew has had who was already aware of phrases like “content management system,” so we were able to get into the weeds.
As I decided to reinvent my old blog, Dot Dot Dot, I told Matthew about my affinity for Signal Hill and especially Cabot Tower, where my grandfather — a telegraph operator for Canadian Marconi — worked for much of his career. Before the Second World War, my mother and her young siblings grew up in a duplex just below the knoll on which Cabot Tower rests. (That bit of family history is a story for another time.)
Beyond all that, I never get tired of looking at the harbour in St. John’s, and thought an image of it would be nice to anchor the whole site.
Matthew came back with illustrations that got across what I had in mind … and created variants that can change depending on the time of day.
Here is the daytime view:
And here is the evening view:
Oh, that little moon.
You can choose either view, by the way, or leave it on auto. I like to toggle between the two myself.
Matthew configured it that as the reader scrolls down the home page, the landscape banner compresses in depth. Love that touch. There’s also a little bit of movement in the wave element at the bottom.
From our earliest chat, I told Matthew that the site needed to look great on a phone. I knew from years of digital work at CBC that the audience is overwhelmingly mobile, and I imagine that my own work here will more likely be read on a phone than, say, a laptop. Matthew was already there for that orientation.
It’s been a week since the website launched, and I’ve been having fun building something up from scratch, editorially that is.
After our chat on Monday, Matthew made some tweaks, including introducing what I call swim lanes — horizontal queues or mini-lineups — on the front page that I can manually curate.
It’s early days in all this. I expected the traffic to be, um, modest at the start, and I’m actually further ahead than I had thought. I’m not here for the numbers of course, but I’m honest enough to say that I want to know what I’m doing is connecting with people.
A fun fact. In my first incarnation of Dot Dot Dot, which I launched in 2004 and nurtured for well over a decade before letting it go fallow, I linked out to a photo blog that Matthew used to run called Nonglossy. It’s heartening to know that a mutual project brought us together, a couple of decades later.
And, I’m happy to say, we’re going to keep meeting up for a coffee and a chat.