Remember when you had that *first* genius moment in design when we discovered effects in Photoshop or the gradient mesh tool in Illustrator? (I remember these moments quite fondly…) Its always great to look back and where we came from and laugh at ourselves I asked some of my fellow designers to dig though their archives and share their lovely first attempts at design. Enjoy!

James White – SignalNoise.com

Here is a design for Signalnoise.com I created way back in 1999. At the time I was into my first year working in the design field and I wanted a website that encompassed my creative passion, and for whatever reason I thought the right path was with mad textures and blurry typefaces. I think I JUST discovered the Overlay blending mode so it was all systems go.

I have a jpeg version of almost all the hilarious versions of Signalnoise.com, but this image perfectly captures the raw animosity of a young design idiot trying to forge his way without any real goal or direction. Good times

Brian Hoff – TheDesignCubicle.com

This was one of my first logo designs when I started college in 2001. The brief provided by the instructor was still attached to the file:

“Design a logo for a website dedicated to housing web discussion forums focusing on both current world and political issues.”

You have to love my letter “i” character with the horrid stretched and distorted typeface, and to top things off, this is a PSD file, created entirely in Photoshop — gasp!

Jeff Golenski – Midnight-Shift.net

First website. circa 2001. “must use IE6, baaaaaddd netscape” font tags and tables inside of tables inside of tables. It’s an angelfire site and it’s actually STILL online. http://www.angelfire.com/music3/stuffwedo/index2.htm go browse that badboy!

Dan Denney – DanDenney.com

I can’t believe that I’m about to share this.

Anyways, this was an awful concept that I had back in the day (2004) and started building for my personal site. Aside from the obvious problems, there is more to this story.

I had just learned about layering using a flash emulator called Swish. So, each “section” came in on its own and was animated. What could be radder than that, huh?

Eek.

Liz Andrade CmdShiftDesign.com

I wish I had something older, but I think this is pretty horrific. This poster was designed in art school for a class project, I feel like I had absolutely no concept for designing for my audience at all and they type setting is atrocious.

Chanell Shorter – Cshorter.com

This was a poster I had to do in one of my adverting design class. I took the photo myself! I even got this one in the student art show. My photography and graphics have some a long way lol.

Danny Outlaw – @DannyOutlaw

It amazes me how sites I designed even a month ago look like crap compared to what I am currently designing.

Take this site for example, when I designed it, I thought it was amazing. Looking back on it now, it is obviously extremely bad. Craziest part about this design, people actually paid for it as a premium theme! Despite the sales, I have stopped selling this because of the poor quality.

Chad Mueller – @ChadMuller

1 I had to add this, good old lens flare effect…. what a staple in design.

2 This was my first take on using illustrator… I would trace friends faces, celebrity photos and such.. I have to admit this is something that really has helped me with my design skills.

3 This piece was created in high – school.. this was my first pass at photoshop filters… have to love radial blurs eh…

4 This was done in my first year of college. I was just recently introduced to photoshop brushes… that might explain the piece.

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Andrew Houle – MyInkBlog.com

This is one of my first iterations of Houle Designs, which was my old personal portfolio site. I went through many more horrific designs before I finally ditched the site. I’m now reworking my portfolio under a different domain name, but it’s still a little ways away. Man, this design is terrible, but we all have to start somewhere, right

Mark Batup – Blur-Designs.com

I fell into graphic design, I got my first job scanning in photos for a small design agency who’s focus was estate agencies. After a while, after mastering re-touching photos, they asked me to produce an image to show 2 companies becoming one. This is what I came up with, I hope it speaks for itself. 10 years later I still like looking at it, but I would certainly do it differently!

@mbatup

Andy Sowards – @AndySowards

Wow, I really dugg deep this time. I found an old and very simple flash slideshow that I built for practice several years ago, when I was taking some classes and had a strange fascination with flash lol. This was probably my first attempt to build anything useful in flash, and its a really basic flash slideshow, which I created the left and right nav buttons in photoshop, and also photoshopped some pics of my wife and me, and our boys (which were actually really little babies at the time!) It was a good learning experience, and I have built a ton of random flash things since then, but its funny to look back and think how happy I was when I got that slideshow working right lol. Now If I was ever to do a slideshow it would most definitely be done in jQuery!

Kitty Florido – DesignBackslash.com

This is the Press ad we ran for the first venture (a dot com) I was in as a designer and an entrepeneur: Guatebodas (Guate-weddings, for a rough translation) and it was the first wedding portal in Guatemala. I was 21 and an advertising student that had little experience with FreeHand7 or Photoshop.
The design is not great, but it sure does show where I came from! Cheers!

Jeff Fisher – JeffFisherLogomotives.com

As a kid, I wanted to be an artist and while in junior high I had my first exhibit of ink line drawings of historic Oregon buildings. In 1970, at the age of 14, I produced a set of notecards for sale in local galleries and gift shops. For that project I produced my first logo. The image was a graphic representation of the old Salem, Or city hall building, with its clock tower. The illustrative portion was drawn with a rapidograph pen. I created the lettering using black border tape cut with an X-Acto knife. To a teenager, it was a pretty cool design. Looking at it now it reads “Scenes Salem,” instead of the intended “Salem Scenes” and it’s pretty rough. However, it is a hint of my future identity designs combining text and graphic elements.

AJ Troxell – PhireDesign.net/

ack when I was huge in to politics and anti-war designs like this were a common thing for me to create in my spare time. It’s so terrible, it’s not even funny.