Hmmm… the book? Me? The website? … What, exactly?
This is supposed to be the first post on this website, and here I am, sitting in front of my computer wondering what I should actually write about. The book? I could, of course, but there is already quite a lot about the book here, and I am sure I will come back to it more than once, so I thought that perhaps, to begin with, I would tell you about something completely different. About how this place came to be — the website you are on right now.
Since you have already found your way here, perhaps it is worth knowing that this is entirely my own creation, and that before the finished website appeared, I managed to change the whole concept several times, taking everything apart and putting it back together again, nearly breaking it, and even losing part of what I had already done because, of course, at one point I was faster than my own common sense.
I am not going to pretend that this was some great disaster, though, because the truth is that this whole adventure of building the website gave me a tremendous amount of pleasure. Even more so because I decided to do it myself, learning whatever I happened to need along the way, and as you can probably imagine, when you work like that, one question very quickly leads to another.
At first, I thought the most important thing was simply for the website to work, for people to be able to find the book, read the information and move comfortably from one place to another.
Simple?
Then came the colours.
And that was when the real fun began.
Because what colours should a website actually have? The ones that happen to be fashionable? The ones that match the book cover? The ones that look good on other websites? Or perhaps, above all, the ones I feel comfortable with myself and will still want to look at not just for five minutes, but for the next few months or even years?
Naturally, I started searching.
First, I checked Pantone’s Colour of the Year — you probably know this already, but just as a reminder, Pantone is a colour standardisation system used, among other things, in design — because I thought that if I was choosing colours anyway, they might as well be in keeping with a global trend. I found a white that reminded me of a cloud and… no.
Pretty. Delicate. Just completely wrong for a website as the main base colour around which I wanted to build everything else.
Then came Pinterest — a platform used for finding and saving visual inspiration — websites devoted to graphic design, ready-made colour combinations and one palette after another, which I looked at, put aside, came back to, compared, and wondered why something I liked so much in someone else’s design suddenly stopped feeling quite so right once I tried to bring it into my own.
I wonder if that ever happens to you too?
You look at something and think, “Oh, that’s it!”, and a moment later you try to use it yourself, only to discover that although everything seems as though it should work, somehow it just doesn’t.
At some point, I realised that simply looking at other people’s suggestions was not going to solve anything anymore and that I had to do it my own way — step by step, in a logical, organised way. My kind of organised way.
So I started creating my own samples.
Every colour I liked went onto one of the boards I had prepared. I numbered them, placed them next to one another, looked at how one behaved beside another, mixed cool shades with warm ones, strong colours with delicate ones, and experimented with opposites. Then one colour would be eliminated, another would return, while another looked wonderful on its own but dreadful in combination, so that one too had to say goodbye to the palette.
And slowly, colour by colour, board by board, the ones you can now see on the website began to emerge.
I have to admit, I had a wonderful time.
And somewhere along the way, I once again discovered that certain professional habits stay with you for good, because once I start arranging something, it is not enough for me to have it “more or less right”. I want it to be perfect, and I want everything together to look exactly the way I intended it to.
You can look around the website now and judge the result for yourself. Can you see those little details?
The colours, the transitions, the places where one shade appears next to another — or do you simply look at the whole thing and think, “nice”, or perhaps, “not really me”?
I am genuinely curious, because I can see every single one of those little details. What is more, I can also see the ones I would still like to improve.
Well, yes.
And this is where my little — or perhaps not so little — professional quirk makes its appearance: that attention to detail which sometimes, almost without being noticed, crosses a line and starts looking suspiciously like perfectionism.
And as I was once again moving things around, lining them up and checking whether everything was exactly where I wanted it to be, something came back to me that, in truth, has absolutely nothing to do with websites.
My dogs. I know, this was supposed to be about the website.
But apparently that is simply how my mind works: one thought opens another drawer, and suddenly, instead of sitting at my computer, I am somewhere completely different.
When dogs took over the house, they could walk all over me if they wanted to, but their things had to be in order. Beds and food bowls — perfectly lined up, everything in its place — and even today, when I think about it, I smile, because of course my dogs could not have cared less whether a bowl was standing three centimetres further to the right.
I cared.
Preparing my Fern — my Newfoundland — for a dog show was a completely different story altogether.
If you have ever seen a Newfoundland, you know there is certainly no shortage of fur, even between the paws, and if you have not, believe me — there is plenty to brush, tidy and trim. And of course every part had to be properly prepared; nothing was allowed simply to stick out because it happened to feel like it.
My girl was incredibly patient. Very patient.
But even she sometimes had enough of her owner and her firm belief that we would just fix this little bit here, then a tiny bit over there, one more stray tuft, and then we really, truly would be finished.
I remember the look on her face when I finally put down the brush and scissors and she could lie down in peace.
She could not speak, of course, but I knew perfectly well what that expression was saying:
“Woman, can I please just be a dog now?”
And there we are.
I started with the colours of the website and ended up with my Fern.
It also makes me realise a few things about myself. The attention to detail is still there. Perfectionism has not gone anywhere either. A force of nature — without even trying, really; after all, I was the one leading my dogs.
Curiosity and creativity seem to be doing quite well too — while creating this one thing, I came up with several others, and I already want to start working on all of them at once.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, I realised that I have both memories and perspective. Memories simply appear, uninvited, and I do not want to push them away just because they belong to what has already been.
Memories do not have to stop us from being here and now. Mine certainly do not. Sometimes quite the opposite: they remind me how much I have already experienced, how many people and animals have been part of my world, what I learned from them, what changed me, and what, despite all those changes, has somehow remained a part of me. Yes, because I learned something from every one of my dogs, and those lessons are valuable to me.
And the website?
Finished… well, all right, it will probably always be only almost finished, because I know that every time I look at it, I will notice something that could be better, different, improved.
But it is here.
In the colours I chose myself, mixed, rejected and chose all over again. With everything arranged the way I wanted it. With the book that, in a way, started all of this, and with all the new ideas that managed to appear along the way.
I like it here.
How about you?
I would genuinely love to know.
Just don’t try to persuade me to change the entire colour palette straight away.
Because I might actually be tempted to start all over again.
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