Well, I just graduated from Canisius College a month ago, and already started working full time at STUDIO llc. I also stopped messing around and got a real version of mattmcgurn.com/asymptotedesign.com onto the web today.

I started Asymptote Design, my name for my design brand, in 2004 when I was a senior in high school as a place for me to put all my work, and maybe get a freelance gig two. Here’s what it looked like way back then:

Yeah, pretty crappy, but I didn’t know what I was doing at all at the time. Then in late 2005, I designed version 2, which looked like this:

That was totally made with tables, and most of the HTML was done (poorly) by Photoshop…pretty embarrassing I know.

With the new version, I wanted it to look like I knew what I was doing, and I think I pulled that off. It took so long for me to get this off the ground because I was committed to everything being contained on one page, and the load time to be as minimal as humanly possible. This meant optimizing EVERY image on the page, doing some sneaky JavaScript, and most time consuming of all, cutting down my portfolio. It was hard for me to not include every piece I thought that was portfolio-worthy, but I think the 20 pieces that made the final cut really showcase where my strengths are.

Well enough talk, go check it out! mattmcgurn.com

The Version 3 Beta of my portfolio site, AsymptoteDesign.com has been live for almost 2 months now, and I am hard at work on a finalized third version of the site. ‘Version 3 Beta’ was mostly a joke because in the Web 2.0 world, everything has a beta version for some reason, but it was also a way for me to quickly get up some of my new work with good HTML/CSS while at the same time getting rid of the crappy, two years old 2nd version of the site.

Re-Branding is a scary thing to do because you need to create an all new look, while at the same time not alienating everyone who knows your old brand (which wasn’t hard for me since no one knows my site haha). But going into Version 3, I knew it was time to re-brand my image. I have had the same exact look since 2003, and I designed it when I really had no idea about good design or what branding even was. So I started my re-branding by making a list of all the things that I didn’t like about my current image. Top of the list was the white backgrounds that took up 90% of the screen in the first two versions. My branding for the last 5 years was essentially straight out of the 90s GAP khaki commercials and Apple’s Switch campaign (If the Switch campaign brought the name Ellen Feiss to mind, you are a HUGE nerd…don’t even say she wasn’t super hot).

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