Throughout my career as a visual artist I have adhered to the principal that successful graphic design honors communication over decoration. This is why the design direction of this web site honors the form over function ethos. If I have been successful, you will take note of my artwork, but not the device that has been used to present it to you.
What follows is a list of design decisions I made to realize my vision for this site.
I did not chose a special font for this site. This was an especially difficult sacrifice for me, because I love typography. There are several reasons I chose to go in this direction. In my youth, typography choices were absolute. Once the ink or paint dried, the font choice was permanent, so the designer's choice of letter style was final. Web design represents a break in this ancient principal. The electronic era we currently live in allows us to do many things that were not previously possible. For example, a person with poor vision can use their web browser to zoom into text. A blind person can have the text spoken out loud, or presented to them in a brail reader. Browsers allow their masters (you) to chose fonts of their own liking. But, most importantly of all, I believe that the font that is the easiest to read is the best font. And it is a good bet that the default font for your browser was chosen for this reason, so who am I to argue. I prefer to get out of the way.
I did not use colors in the website design. By limiting my web site palette to black white and grey, I allow the true voice of the site to be that of my artwork. The website itself is nothing more than a frame. Each of us can probably see Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa in their imagination, but very few can remember what the frame looks like. And this is the way it should be. The frame is a tool, not a decoration. If you look closely at my site's footer you will see an exception to the site palette, where I used a blue line to divide the links. This was done as a nod to the Drupal logo, which I include in the footer. To learn about the Drupal logo and why I have included it click on this link.
There is no animation on my site. Animation can be problematic for people who have motion induced illness. This is the primary reason I do not use a slide show on my home page. When I do web development for customers who desire animation, I utilize special javascript that hides the animation when a user has selected "reduced motion" in their system preferences.