Oh hey — I’m Michael Rose, just another boring, tattooed, time traveling designer from Buffalo, New York.

I’m into drawing portraits of strangers on an iPad Pro, eating popcorn and chicken wings, watching dust collect on my vinyl record collection, and playing single-player console exclusives¹.

When I’m not drawing on my iPad or releasing open source Jekyll themes, I work as a web designer and content administrator for a leading global provider of laboratory products. On any given day I’m designing user-interfaces, building landing pages, and massaging content in and out of a CMS with the help of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

And if that wasn’t enough to keep me busy — I’m also the father of twin girls and married to a subscription box addicted vegan.

Self portrait and my 2 little rosebuds drawn with Paper by FiftyThree.

My tattoos are a mess of line and words. Don’t ask me to explain them — because I can’t.

About the site

So what does this all have to do with made mistakes and why did I name the website this?

It vaguely has something to do with that whole happy accident thing, where a mistake can turn out to be something great and unplanned. But to be honest I was just looking for a short, memorable sounding domain name.

In May of 2004 I purchased mademistakes.com, and threw up a Macromedia Flash splash screen (hey remember those?) while I worked on building out my portfolio. For the next couple of years I would experiment with various content management systems (Movable Type → Textpattern → Wordpress → Indexhibit), developing minimalistic themes and learning what I could about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL databases.

I’ve since decided to abandon using a CMS in favor of black magick and Jekyll to generate flat files for improved performance and security. Building layouts, stylesheets, feeds, and assets from scratch was challenging at first, but the knowledge gained made it all worth it.

How to support Made Mistakes

I write tutorials and maintain a few open source projects for fun. If you’ve found any of them useful, here’s how you can show thanks:

1. Follow me on Twitter or subscribe to one of my RSS feeds.
2. Buy anything at Amazon using this link and I’ll earn a small commission.
3. Send a donation via PayPal or Square Cash.

Selected interviews

• The Story of PaperFaces — A New Atlantis
• …don’t break the chain — Sktchy artist feature

Honorable mentions

• 22 Gorgeous Pieces Of Art You Won’t Believe Were Drawn On An iPad — Business Insider
• This Summer We Learned About PaperFaces — FiftyThree

1. Nintendo Account: mmistakes, Xbox Live: anotherJPEG, PlayStation Network: anotherjpeg ↩