About

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Fantastic… you’ve discovered the about page of Michael Rose. Just another boring, bearded, tattooed, time traveling designer who hails from Buffalo, New York.

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

To say hello or ask a question, my contact page has all those details.

Professional work

For over 20 years I’ve been making stuff on the web. I specialize in writing semantic and accessible HTML/CSS and building templates for static site generators.

I cut my teeth on poorly crafted HTML pages hosted with AOL and Geocities in high school. Which later evolved into building Macromedia Flash (hey remember that?) sites for local independent bands when I wasn’t learning about typography, design, and how to draw at RIT.

After graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology with degrees in Design and Illustration I started my career at a science education company named Science Kit. There I did layout and catalog production on huge thousand page tomes, designed marketing collateral, and built table-based HTML email promotions among other things.

Today I work as a content administrator/web designer/frontend developer for a leading global provider of laboratory products. On any given day I’m massaging text and assets in and out of enterprise content management systems you’ve probably never heard, building web pages for marketing campaigns, creating user-interfaces, and working with HTML/CSS/JavaScript to flesh out pattern libraries, components, templates, and static prototypes across an array of digital properties.

And if that wasn’t enough, in my spare time I give back to the open source community by maintaining Jekyll themes and other projects.

Offline

When not in front of a computer, I’m the father of twin girls and married to a subscription box addicted vegan. There aren’t many photographs of the Rose family together as Wendy and myself are more comfortable behind a camera…

Wendy holding Everly and Chloe in amongst pumpkins.
Identical twin girls in identical pink floral Easter dresses.
Michael bearded in a knit hat posing with his daughter who has a carrot painted on her check.
Rose family sitting in Santa's sleigh during Christmas time.

For a time I was into tattoos and making my arms look like someone scribbled all over them… 🤷🏻‍♂️. Don’t ask me to explain why or what they all mean — I have no idea what I was thinking when I got them years ago.

Tattoo. Black line work of a woman and man forming together as their hands become a solid black heart.
Tattoo. Bride with a bloody nose is comforted by her husband.
Tattoo of black ink splatter and printed text from André Breton's Nadja and Mad Love.
Black arm tattoo of trees and birds.
Tattoo. Black line work of a one-armed woman whose hair has become a perch for nesting birds.

Listening to and collecting punk, post-hardcore, emo, screamo (are they called skarmz now?), and indie rock 7-inches and LP’s were a big part of my 20’s. Back then I didn’t have a mortgage or a family to care for so I could waste my paychecks on records or Nintendo Gamecube discs.

Six LP records hung on a wall with plastic shelves and removable Command Strips.

I’ve gone through the painful exercise of packing up and transporting around 800 records more times than I’d like, claiming each to be the last.

Audio Technica turntable and 800 records stored in cubed shelves.

But here we are — cubbies occupying space in my office, full of heavy dust collection objects, that are rarely played except for a nostalgic listen or to update my collection on Discogs.

Online

I promise not to junk up your feeds as I rarely post on social media these days. Feel free to follow me on any of the online services below to connect:

About the site

What does this all have to do with made mistakes and why’d you name this site that?

Well it vaguely has to do with the idea of a happy accident, where mistakes can turn out to be something unplanned and great. But to be honest, I wanted a short and memorable domain name that sounded less emo than my previous personal site — fadedleaf.com. Guess I failed at that 🤓 …

Backstory

In May of 2004 I purchased mademistakes.com, and uploaded a splash screen while I worked on building out my online portfolio. For the next couple of years I would migrate the site between content management systems (Movable Type → Textpattern → Wordpress → Indexhibit), developing minimalistic themes and learning more about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL databases in the process.

I’ve since decided to abandon the idea of using a monolithic CMS to build this site, in favor of the Jamstack. With a bit of black magick and Gatsby I get a better performing and secure site built from version controlled Markdown and other static files. Pushed up and deployed by GitHub and hosted by Netlify.

For the curious, you can read this page for the hardware and software I use to build Made Mistakes.

Selected interviews

Honorable mentions

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