Some projects force you to stop and think, not just about the project itself, but about yourself too. Not all of them are just colors, codes, and pages to read. Some carry memories and snippets, others have a unique scent from the past, and some simply make you smile when you see them working.
This is my story with Design Deal. For those who don’t know, it’s a website that offers periodic bundles for designers and developers. This post isn’t an advertisement for it, as many of my blog readers have likely seen and explored its contents. This post is just a space where I can express my feelings whenever I visit the site.
The website first appeared two years ago as a joint effort between me and my friend, Mohammad Tahan. The idea wasn’t particularly new or unusual in the global context; it’s based on the model of Bundlehunt, but it was the first of its kind in the Arab world.
I vividly remember when we started working on the first bundle, which included “design, development, and content,” in a small café in Syria. It was just Mohammad and me, spending hours experimenting with design and coding. I recall how much time we spent moving a button 1px up, changing its color, or removing the shadow, and then announcing it. We would sit back and watch the download count increase. It was an incredible feeling that kept me awake at night, watching the number of visits and downloads. We had a challenge between us about how many downloads the site would reach, and the target was 1,000. Yes, a number that now seems trivial amidst the millions of YouTube views, but it wasn’t trivial to us. I read the name of every person who downloaded the bundle. We weren’t aiming for hundreds of thousands of views or thousands of dollars. All we wanted was to create something beautiful, simple, and organized, something that would make anyone who saw it smile. That’s how the first month’s bundle went, and a few days before the end of the month, I received a message from Mohammad: “Congratulations, 1,000!”
As for the second bundle, we started working on it and finished it to the sounds of clashes and shelling in Syria. Those were bad and distressing days, but now I remember how I would time the sound of the shelling with each increase in the download count, smiling to myself. The third bundle was created after I had left Syria, and we worked on it remotely, which caused it to be delayed significantly.
Then the website was paused for a long time until Mohammad joined me, and we resumed working on the current bundle. The interesting part is that we completed almost three bundles in total, including the design, development, and content, yet we never released them. One was a special Ramadan bundle, another was a bundle that included an Arabic HTML template, and the third was a set of user interfaces in PSD and HTML formats. Each time, the reason for cancellation was different.
Now, when I quickly flip through these memories, I realize that your projects, or even those small designs you created just for fun or to escape from your world, and even those ideas you jotted down in the margins of your notebooks during lectures, were more significant than you imagined at the time. Some were tied to specific memories or events, others intertwined with ideas from here and there to form something bigger. Some became a complete reel of memories that reflect your life in all its details—your success, failure, frustration, perseverance, sadness, or even joy in things too simple to mention. And every time its name is mentioned, or you see a part of it… you remember yourself.