freak.ie is a thing now

jasonblog

freak.ie launch artwork that's really an old timey barn raising

Run and tell the neighbours, shout it from the highest peaks, stop the presses etc. I’m really happy to say that after a long period of not existing, freak.ie is now a thing. If you’ve been eagerly waiting (doubtful) I really appreciate that, sorry to keep you in suspense. Here’s a brief story about making this.

So for the last five or so months I’ve been running a freelance business making websites (and other stuff), whose name is a website (freak.ie, haven’t you heard?), without actually having a website. Quite cheeky I think, but probably not very sustainable. So I made this:

The first design for freak.ie
Just to clarify, it took quite a while to make. And was pretty close to being finished. And then I scraped it and started again.

Why?

To put it really simply, it wasn’t what I wanted. It was flashy and slick (and used the royal ‘we‘ a lot) and looked and sounded like it belonged to a big fancy design company. It probably would have been really good at selling my stuff. But I just wasn’t happy with the direction it was going. I started this journey (ugh) to create something that reflected myself, my personality, and the kind of projects I wanted to work on. This wasn’t that. So I went with this instead:

this is how freak.ie looks in this timeline
It’s literally the website you’re currently looking at. Yeah, it’s still upselling like crazy — I do have to make a living — but the tone and scale are more in line with what I want it to be. If anything, there’s still a bit too much going on. I can only imagine the next iteration will be something along these lines:

This is the future of web design

There’s probably a lesson in here about authenticity, or integrity, or market niches or something, I’m sure I don’t need too spell it out. In all honesty, I just wanted to post something so when people came to the site the last blog item wasn’t from February, and this is the best I’ve got. Anyways, I think it turned out alright (this blog post and the website).