My name is Erik Morris, and I’m an experience designer, typographic tinkerer, and public infrastructure enthusiast. After graduating from Detroit's College for Creative Studies in 2018, I worked as a UX designer in the automotive industry before moving to Chicago to pursue a commute free of desolate, beige suburbs.
Despite being in a creative field, I find that my strongest design solutions are those conceived through systems and logic. I am a strong proponent of modularity, and enjoy utilizing systems and logic to generate new and innovative design solutions — thus, my entire personal brand is based on one uniform grid.
Each letter of my personal typeface is created by drawing lines along a basic 3x3 grid, then made more visually distinct through the use of rounded corners. The iconography used throughout the site follows the same set of guidelines, resulting in a visually cohesive, easy to produce library of symbols that mesh flawlessly with the rest of the brand.
Likewise, my color palette was also created using a series of modular guidelines. I first created a set of 16 overlapping circles, then assigned each a Red, Green, and Blue color value based on their position in the grid. I then set each circle’s blend-mode to “Multiply,” and the resulting blended colors became the basis for my brand’s palette.
None of them! This entire website was created by hand using only raw HTML, CSS, and just a pinch of jQuery. While I am not a professional computer scientist (nor do I ever intend to be), I think it is very important for any modern designer to have at least some code literacy. This website is one of the tools I use to grow and maintain my own programming knowledge.
The site went through many incarnations before reaching its current state, and has (somewhat ironically) become one of my most complex design projects to date. The most recent version is still very new, so there will likely be even more changes and new content over the coming months.
Despite the clean, system-based outcomes of many of my projects, the process, thoughts, and research that go into creating those systems often ends up being fairly messy and hard to concisely articulate. In order to keep my site reasonably skimmable for the average viewer, I’ve cut a lot of that information from the main project pages.
However, if you want to know more about the background work that went into any of my projects, click the Process Spotlight icon on each project page. There, you’ll find a more in-depth explanation of the convoluted process that went into creating the final solution. That, or contact me directly! I’m always down to chat about any of my work more in-depth via phone or Zoom.