Made Mistakes

About

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 exclusives.

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.

Michael Rose iPad self portrait Everly and Chloe iPad Paper drawing
Self portrait of moi and my two little rosebuds drawn with Paper for iOS.

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.

Rose family sitting in Santa's sleigh
Family portrait in Attica, NY — Christmas 2019.

I also have tattoos covering my arms that look like someone scribbled all over them… 🤷🏻‍♂️.

Michael Rose's tattoos
Don't ask me to explain these — because I can't.

About the site

What does this all have to do with made mistakes and why did I name it that?

It vaguely has 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 just wanted a short and memorable domain name.

In May of 2004 I purchased mademistakes.com, and uploaded 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 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 the monolithic CMS in favor of the JAMstack. With a bit of black magick and Gatsby I get a better performing and secure site built from Markdown files.

Follow me on the internets

I promise not to junk up your feeds as I rarely post on social media.

Selected interviews

Honorable mentions