An Exploration of Flavour

I came across a screenshot the other day that had a list of projects that I had built over 10 years ago. There was a Flickr app, a Twitter app, a job site, an ad platform. I had forgotten how prolific I was at one time.

I definitely fell into a rut there.

Lately, though, I’ve been getting back into exploring design and flexing my design and front-end skills on some personal projects. Last year, I launched Fifty to document a food adventure. I played around with CSS grids and took inspiration from magazines to create a design I was proud of. Months later, I’m still loading up the site just to stare at it. Feels good, y’all.

Along those lines, I’ve jumped heavily into the world of whisky. I’ve attended Web Whisky Weekend for the last fives years, which has been a fantastic way to explore whisky. Last year, we had 150 different bottles. Crazy.

Over those five years, I’ve been buying bottles and growing my collection at home. I’m up to about 60 bottles. Crazy.

I decided to build a site to track my personal library: The Snook Nook.

It’s been fun playing around with new CSS features like clamp() and trying different grid techniques. If you’re on desktop, check out how “The Snook Nook” font size and letter spacing grow and shrink as you resize the page to ensure the title always stays on the same line and feels balanced with the page.

Once again, I borrowed heavily from print magazines and I’m really happy with how the design is coming together. Yes, there are still some rough corners and I’m continuing to iterate on the design. I did the same thing with Fifty.

I went through two other designs before I settled on this one and found myself hesitating to build it until I thought the design was done. Of course, perfection is the enemy of done, so I was happy this design was good enough to feel okay putting out something that wasn’t perfect.

If you enjoy whisky, I’d love it if you followed along. If you don’t, maybe you’ll enjoy me fumbling over words trying to describe what this golden liquor tastes like. Come visit The Snook Nook.