I came across an amazing site today from designer Dustin Curtis.  It’s a personal look into his thoughts, life, and design work.  Part portfolio, part blog (even though he has a separate blog), part expose and manifesto, it’s an amazing work of art that kept me captivated for over an hour.  An hour.

An hour.

For someone firmly embedded in the Gen-Y I-have-a-2-second-attention-span mindset, that’s amazing.

The interesting part for me is that it highlighted the tension inherent to personal design sites: on the one hand, they need to showcase a designer’s personality, her work, her approach, and her success.  And sometimes the best way to do this is to act like everything but a portfolio site – lots of personal flavor, random musings, and beautiful (often non traditional) design elements. On the other hand, the site is generally supposed to generate awareness around the designer’s work, with the overall hope that this awareness (through cross linking, comments, forwarding, etc.) will eventually lead to paying work.

So it has to look like a duck and sound like a duck, but bark like a dog.  What gives?