I really like making things. I follow a lot of people on the internet — in fields that range from industrial design to data visualization — because I really respect their craftsmanship. All these people who take the time to carefully tinker, polish, and present their creations are the people I want to be.
In many ways, I’ve reflected this in my design practice. I sweat the micro-interactions. I do a lot of iterations until the experience feels spick-and-span. I started paying attention to standards and understanding how my tools really work. But there’re still quite a few itches I’m yet to scratch.
I’m still not contributing enough to the pool of design content from which I take so much, and there are other types of design I want to do and share, like interior design and visual essays. As I started thinking about a new website, this was my guiding light.
I currently write on my Medium blog and it’s a messy mix of personal and professional essays. Now that I was thinking of creating even more types of content, questions sprung up quickly. Where will I put what? Should I self-host a blog on my website and ditch the Medium network? Where do I keep case studies? Do I even need case studies? How do these choices affect the time to build?
It took a few days to decide on what to do, but I concluded that I wasn’t going to make this new version a portfolio site for my work. I’m in a position where I no longer need to present a portfolio on my website. I can spend my time writing detailed case studies that can be helpful to others, and just curate links to all these case studies on the site.
I also decided not to self-host a blog. I don’t have a problem keeping my work where I do it: my Paystack work will be documented on the team’s blog, and my Helloworld projects on the collective’s blog as well. Looking at it through this lens, I also saw the opportunity to separate my design work from my personal journal completely, and thus Wuruwuru was born.
Wuruwuru is a Nigerian word that describes a hurried and haphazard approach to doing things. This is how I’ve previously described myself as a designer and developer. Now that I’m changing that attitude and taking the time to specialize and sweat the details, I still like the irony of calling my design publication Wuruwuru.
Creating Wuruwuru is also a small step towards my goal of learning to build visual essays and web experiments, as I plan to publish all this work from there. I hope to build something at least once every six months, and for the first one, I’m making a visual essay on renting my first apartment.
To see what the new site looks like, visit opemipo.com. If you’re interested in how I built it, read the essay on Wuruwuru or the source code on Github.
