I’m at home now. Well, not “home” home, but with family. I suppose after moving to Sacramento, I found myself making a new “home” home for myself.

It feels strangely, mostly because it feels as though I never left in the first place. I suppose that’s what “home” should feel like – a place you return to that feels familiar. Home base, home page, whatever – the word “home” I suppose has become synonymous with familiarity.

For designers, coming “home” might be revisiting familiar, older designs. It’s always refreshing to look back at what’s historical and past. When I see my old designs, I realize that in some ways I have come a very long way as far as aesthetics and coding go (the theme I’m currently working on is far more technically advanced than any other theme I’ve worked on in the past, but it’s definitely less minimalistic in design than many of my older ones.

However, I suppose while sloughing through lines of code and troubleshooting, there are moments in which a depression comes over me. Things begin to feel hard, and I wonder how am I going to improve? How am I going to keep going on if I get stuck in a standstill?

I spoke to a friend of mine not too long ago; they were going through something similar. I told them to look back on some of their old projects; it did for them what it does for me. Looking back on history gives a person a small boost of ego; a person sees that such and such work wasn’t half as bad looking, or maybe sees how much they really have improved. Normally I don’t advocate looking back like this, but in a sense, I think it really makes a person feel better when they see their own improvement.