Outer Focus' Origin Story

A look at how Outer Focus came to be, and how this designer simplified his understanding of web platforms


A placeholder image from Unsplash

Dipping toes

The origin-story of Outer Focus goes back to what feels like years ago now, during London’s alarmingly Mediterranean summer of 2019. I was perched upon a desk in one of our team’s meeting rooms while Nuno, clutching a white-board marker, was slowly prying my eyes open to how static site-generators worked. My background is in design so any code I know is purely self-taught which has unfortunately resulted in over-complicated and bloated CMS (content management systems) solutions to my web needs. I’ve built perhaps 10 WordPress-based sites relying on custom themes of which I relied on a series of YouTube tutorials, Stack Overflow and Reddit to complete.

My history with web development is pretty crude but might be familiar to other designers who wanted to launch something quickly. This spans over around 10 years, with maybe a couple of months per year dedicated to building something functional. It’s roughly looked like this:

  1. Building a page in Photoshop and using the slice tool to export it as HTML (yes, that’s it)
  2. Building a static site, sometimes using templates online
  3. Custom instances of WordPress with home-made themes
  4. Jekyll + Netlify
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