Before the five projects I'm currently working through in my rebuilding phase, I spent some time building multiple smaller projects and experimenting with different ideas.
One of them was a concert invitation website.
At the time, I was also trying to improve the visual quality of my websites and push myself beyond just making something functional. Funnily enough, that process taught me quite a lot.
I got to explore some of the newer things that had been added or improved in HTML, CSS, and Tailwind CSS.
For CSS especially, I found myself using and experimenting with things I had either never used before or honestly never thought about using.
One small example was this custom Tailwind utility:
/* Injecting this into the Tailwind config via @layer utilities */
.blend-img {
@apply grayscale mix-blend-multiply w-full h-full object-cover;
}
This allowed me to combine a few utilities into a reusable class while creating a particular visual treatment for an image.
- "grayscale" removes the image's colour
- "mix-blend-multiply" allows the image to blend with the elements behind it
- "w-full h-full" makes it fill its container
- "object-cover" ensures the image maintains its proportions while covering the available space
It was a small thing, but experimenting with effects like this helped me think more about how code and design can work together.
Coming from a graphic design background, I've been increasingly interested in bringing some of that visual thinking into the websites I build instead of treating development and design as two completely separate things.
That said, after all that building, I still noticed something I wasn't happy with:
The dependency was still there.
I was building.
I was learning.
I was completing projects.
But I could still see places where I relied too much on AI and tutorials instead of trusting my own understanding and problem-solving ability.
That realization is part of what eventually led to my current rebuilding phase.
So this isn't one of the five projects I'm currently working through.
It's simply a glimpse of something I created earlier while going back and rebuilding with HTML and CSS from scratch before everything that followed.
And while my foundation still wasn't as solid as I wanted it to be, I definitely learned a lot along the way.
I guess that's part of the journey.
Sometimes you don't realize how much you've learned until you stop and look back at something you built.
And sometimes, you don't realize what you still need to improve until you do the same.
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