personal projects/every website i've ever had
take a scroll down memory lane with this attempt to catalog every website i've ever had throughout my 21+ year history of representing myself online with a personal website, and some of the technology associated with them.
web-based
1983 - ongoing
1983 - 1990
after seeing Matthew Broderick in the movie War Games in 1983 (pictured above) i was able to convince my parents to purchase my brother (also pictured above) and i a Commodore64 and 300baud modem. within weeks we had our own phone line and set up a bulletin board system on our C64 called Dr. Decibles Lab running on HAL'S BBS and programmed in BASIC. unfortunately no images of this "site" exist, but the various images above give you an idea of what it was like. this was the beginning of my life online, and at 7-11.
2000 - 2001
throughout the 90s, while the rest of the world caught on to the world wide web, i pursued other useless pursuits, like hanging out with friends and going to parties. i didn't get back online until 2000, with the purchase of my first domain name and an IBM Aptiva personal computer. while i played catchup by teaching myself HTML with the creation of the website pictured above, people like Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker were realizing the capatalist potential of the internet. instead of inventing online business models, i was just trying to figure out what i'd missed during my 10 year hiatus, which was plenty.
2001 - 2002
updates to my website came almost every four months because i was using it to both represent my artwork online, and to learn how to code HTML with the hopes that i could bridge my creative education with my digital experience to get a job. this was a time when almost anyone that could string together a line of code could get a career during the internet 2.0 explosion. except me. after graduating art school with a BFA in new media and sculpture, i went to work in the basement of a Value Village, sorting through donations.
2002 - 2003
after getting my first professional job doing light web work and print design for a skiwear company, i was able showcase some actual work to balance out the personal art projects i was working on at the time. the visual design of the site above reflects a growing interest in text-based art. it's also the first time i used a little bit of Flash to show an animation, just under my wordmark logo, that i think played a sound and visualized to the user that they were "connected" to my site. dumb, but i had to start somwhere.
2003 - 2006
i stuck with a single page, text link motif for several years, but got rid of the flash. each year i would update the background, change the colors, add some new work, and make an adjustment to the logo to match the current year. the above image is the only visual i have of my site during that era, which is why it's of such poor quality.
2006 - 2007
as Flash began to take over the internet, my skills with it evolved. in 2006 i went all out with a split column design that housed personal info and content from feeds using Javascript includes and api calls from other sites, like Flickr, which was a very new and progressive social media platform for its time. the right side was all Flash, literally. the site would randomly play a .swf from a library of clips i made that used images, sound, and animation to completely overwhelm (and probably annoy) the user with as much "me" as possible.
2007 - 2008
i decided to tone things down in 2007, and although it was a knock off from a concept i saw elsewhere, this single page, one paragraph website was the one that helped me get my first job at a real agency, Engine Digital. it felt like i hit the big time, walking to work every day in the neighborhood where all the other creative agencies, game development studios, and digital product developers were located, not to mention great bars and restaurants. i loved it. which is why, although i've moved offices and changed roles plenty, i'm still working there.
2008 - 2009
by the time 2008 rolled around i had been making HTML-based websites for almost 10 years and you can see from the example of my site above, i thought i was pretty shit hot. i was really into using services that allowed for the syndication of digital activity by rss feed, so that every song i listened to, photo i posted, or update i made could be subscribed to with an rss reader. why anyone would want to do that was beyond me, but hey, it seemed pretty cool at the time.
2009 - 2012
in 2009 i went back to Flash again, and split my art projects into another site called SUPERSERIOUSART, of which no images exist, but the landing page that was used as a portal for all my digital touchpoints is pictured above. similar to my site in 2006, it played a series of .swf files that were mostly made from clips of video-based art projects i was working on at the time. you can also see a link to a Tumblr site. i had been using Tumblr since the service appeared in 2007, and was instantly obsessed with it.
2012 - 2014
with services like Squarespace, Cargo, and Virb making beautiful 1-page sites accessible for everyonne during the mid-2000s, the personal website seemed to become less of a thing. it just didn't seem as necessary anymore, and people were also using instagram and twitter as their home on the web instead of something as labor intensive as a website. it was within that context that i decided to take a less is more approach and go back to the single page format that seemed to work so well for me in 2008.
2014 - 2015
this was probably my least favorite website. the home page (pictured above is the "about" page) featured a demo reel of sorts that i quickly made using a third party plugin that took a huge library of photos and strung them together with music while it rapidly cycled through each image that was supposed to make my life seem pretty exciting, but overall the site was pretty boring.
2015 - 2020
this iteration of the site saw the return of personal artworks presented alongside professional work with a streamlined and simplified navigation. the capabilities of HTML5 allowed for the return of background motion videos without Flash, and this home page cycled through about five of them randomly.
the future
davidlook.net has come a long way since the earliest days of the personal website on a Commodore64. the version you're viewing right now is very similar to the site i launched in 2015. most of the changes have taken place in the background, moving the whole site to a new wordpress theme, and building out a more robust professional work section to better represent my digital creative strategy work.
2024 prestonlook.com
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