Welcome to my new website!

Hi everyone!

It’s been 6 years since the last layout came to life. Way too long but as always I have been struggling to create something for myself. For me it is much easier to put myself in the shoes of others and create the perfect designs for them. But for myself, being a perfectionist and hence very self-critical, it wasn’t that easy to create something new and fresh. But! Here we are now with this brand new design and I hope you love it as much as I do.

Well, let’s go back a couple of years – 17 years to be precise. In 2001 while I was in my graphic design internship at a renowned design studio for classic print design and found this magic thing called internet, I wanted to create my own website. Back then I was writing poems, songs and loved to draw. So I wanted a place to keep those and share my thoughts. Sort of what is Facebook today and back then MySpace wasn’t invented yet. So I created my very first website with Microsoft Word. Yes, you heard right. I had no clue about anything and there was an option in this program to export it as website and that’s what I did. When I think back now I used a design technique that got popular a couple of years later. I took pictures of things like crumbled papers or handwritten notes and even some blue roses and arranged them on the background as if they were just lying around on your screen. I grabbed a free hosting space and an ad-supported ‘.tk’-domain and there it was my first website out there in the interwebs. Exciting times! Because editing the website in Word and having to upload again and again was a pain in the bum, I started using the hosting’s web html-editor. Just by looking through the code, I learned my first lines of code: how to add text in different styles, create links and how to display pictures. And having already loved programming qBasic and Turbopascal back in school, this was interesting and I wanted to learn more.

After I left my internship and started at university, in my free time I would spend my time on my computer teaching myself more HTML and how to use CSS, then later javascript and PHP. Remember those Flash intros in the early 00’s? I wanted that too, so I sat down, installed a 30 days trial version of Flash on my computer and had a go at it. Not long after I had created my first flash intro for my new website design. I created it the way cartoon flip books were made. Burst mode on my Sony Cybershot camera, taking out the background of all pictures and implementing those pictures (basically like a GIF is made) in my flash intro, plus some cool music and it was done: my first Flash intro. At the time I started promoting bands, remember those fan pages back in the day with news, link lists and what not where you would add yourself as fan or member via a small form? Yeah those tiny looking websites and of course I made flash intros for those too. After some discussions with a friend the music portal ‘Suomi Rocks’ came into being. A website which was solely about Finnish rock music and bands which turned out to get pretty popular as information source. From then on I created a couple more websites promoting my favourite bands, those websites were all quite grungy the way it was popular back then and as I loved to play around in Photoshop, just as I still do as it’s my favourite program of all time, I always came up with new ideas and designs. That was also the time when phpBB forums were a big hype and I was implementing these on my websites as a means of communication between fans. And of course I loved customising those forums to fit perfectly to each website. By then I had also started creating websites for friends. Then MySpace was born and it was a great platform to promote literally EVERYTHING you do and get visitors to your websites of course.

In 2004 I purchased my own domain: DaniLust.com – this was another major step for me. Shortly after special domains for the biggest and most popular websites I ran (alone or in cooperations with friends) were added too. It certainly was strange when you would visit a concert and people would come to you saying: ‘Aren’t you doing this and that website? I love it so much, keep up the great work!’ Hearing that from strangers was amazing and I was happy that my websites would bring joy to people and put a smile on their faces.

The summer of 2005 my website should get its biggest hype ever: Do you remember that MSN-virus that would make your computer more or less useless and you couldn’t get rid of it cause it would spread and duplicate itself all the time? I was devastated! Looking for help on the internet, people would tell me to delete my hard drive, start over, you can’t fix it. Little did they know my determination because nothing is impossible and I certainly didn’t want to lose everything that was on my hard drive because EVERYTHING was on there – I didn’t have any back up whatsoever. After reading through things I created a fix that combined several antivirus and spy/trojan/worm removers plus fiddling with your directory. My hard drive was saved and I wanted to help everyone who had fallen victim to this nasty virus. At the time my fix was the only one working and after posting a tutorial on my website, it spiked the visits into the thousands every day.

The other website that even crashed my web server several times because the forum was overloaded by messages and posts was one of my biggest band promotion successes. The website was for the band Negative from Finland and the only place where fans could come together which was why their record company was in touch with my friends and I for promotion. At the time we had created Triple-D-Promotions. Triple-D-Promotions’ biggest event was also in corporation with Negative: A secret fan meeting in a bistro to which the band came as surprise guests. For this event I had created artwork and posters plus tickets. The finnish television channel Yle filmed the event as part of a documentary. Unfortunately I couldn’t be there because of work but I was proud of what we had achieved. In 2008 I had to shut down the website nonetheless as I was busy with final exams for my degree and it got too much even though one of my friends had been running the website updates already and tried to keep things going as my time was limited due to the exams and long work hours on top. The cherry on top was trouble with my web host as the forum would keep crashing their servers. It was a difficult decision cause I know I let lots of people/fans down but you have to do what is best for you and your (mental) health. A lesson I had to learn and I am still learning 10 years later. Being an empath and always wanting to help where I can, it’s certainly not easy.

During the years after my thirst for learning more had me also working with content management systems and using my video editing skills I had learned in university brought me into blue screen editing and later filming as well which of course was combined with make-up, lights set up and perfecting sound recordings. This was only topped by being able to create my own merchandise products for one of the last agencies I worked for. Seeing something come to reality that you created on your screen is something magical.

Fast forward to 2018 and a couple of redesigns later here we are. Back to the future with a brandnew design and hopefully lots of more interesting things to come in the years ahead. So watch out! Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart to everyone who has inspired, motivated and supported me and my work throughout the years. And if you are looking for your own design, may it be logo, web or print design, just get in touch and let’s turn your imagination into reality. Because still my motto is: nothing is impossible.

Much Love,
Dani