If you’re looking for my UX portfolio formerly hosted at neatkeen.com, please go to jmortonux.com.
Background
What is/was “Neat & Keen”? In 2015 I built a screen printing studio in my basement with the intent of becoming a screen printing artist. My hope was to try and get into the gig poster scene (designing posters for rock shows) and maybe some art prints.
It was a rocky start and never really profitable, but in 2017 I formed a sole proprietorship under the name “Neat & Keen” to incorporate all my creative pursuits under one name that didn’t sound like one guy working out of his house (which it totally was).
Then Came UX
In 2022 I began to study UX product design and in this field it is common practice to have an online portfolio of your UX skills. Not knowing better I said, “Oh, I already have a small business and a brand that I’ve been building. I will just roll my portfolio into the Neat & Keen brand.”
It took several months before I figured out that this was a bad idea. Eventually I separated the two, but since I have been more focused on all things UX and not really building the Neat & Keen brand, it didn’t really have anywhere to go.
And since I have submitted hundreds (literally, hundreds) of applications with neatkeen.com as the address of my UX portfolio, I’ve kept that domain in place as a forwarder to the updated site. (Now the opening line of this post makes a lot more sense right?)
Recently I did a small production run of The Love Poem and I wanted to put a url on it so people know about the orgins. Since neatkeen.com is sort of in limbo, I went with johneverettmorton.com.
A month or two ago I started to do some coding (just to keep me on my toes) and this site was all coded by hand with a Bootstrap framework. It was a fun exercise (this is my idea of fun these days), but was going to be really time consuming if I wanted to get back to blogging in any meaningful way. So I’m back to using a WordPress site. I’ll be tweaking the theme styles here and there.
Not Dead Yet
It’s still handy to have Neat & Keen exist as a business name. In fact, I’m about to invoice a freelance project under that name. And I suspect it might come back in some way in the future. Basically I decided I didn’t have to make any big decisions today and I have at least until the domain registration wears off to decide if I want to keep that name around or not.
I’m also reevaluating many of my social media profiles, most of which have some variation on Neat & Keen in the name. I might be turning those to some some variation of my name.
And that’s where things stand with Neat and Keen at the moment. Hope that clears everything up.
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