Site URL: emrysmayell.com (this site)

I began making websites in late 2021, when I made a simple portfolio website for my film partnership Seventh Direction Films. I made the very first version with our hosting provider's free site building tool, but the limits quickly sent my partner Gabriel Studer-Randall and I down a path of discovery that led us to Wordpress. I wish I had more documentation of that early Wordpress site, for nostalgic purposes if nothing else, but I remember that it was an inconsistent nightmare design-wise and Wordpress felt so bloated for what we wanted to do (I don't need ten SEO plugins and twenty shopping cart pages, Wordpress!). Being the perfectionist that I am, I messed with the custom CSS enough that I soon got familiar with the language, and when Gabriel decided to learn HTML and JavaScript to make his own site from scratch, I followed suit.

Since sometime in 2022, I've been consistently tinkering with this site in my free time. For a while, it was just a film and photography portfolio, but since taking a hiatus from more serious film work in 2025, I've added a bunch of other art projects and will continue to add more. I don't need this site to be a professional portfolio anymore, and I do plenty of other work I'd like to show off, and as I move away from social media as the home for showcasing my artistic endeavors, this is the natural place for them.

I overhauled the website in Spring 2026 to lean further into the design language I'd begun developing in late 2025. The border on the left side of text sections, the diamond as a separator/bullet point/design flourish, and the green accent color being strictly for interactions instead of for most links are all changes that had been in the works for a while and are now universal. On the back end, I cleaned up a lot of old code, sped up the site by splitting up more of the code to only be called when necessary, and implemented a PHP variable system to make my life easier when adding in things like the diamonds (◆) and NEW tags.

In the next few months, I'm finally going to bring back a light mode toggle, add lazy loading to speed up the image-heavy pages, and add a bunch of new and old projects (as of April 18th, 2026, I've added 5 this year and planning to add at least 5 more by summer).

The plan for this site is to be the home for all of my creative work, including things I did in the past that I didn't put online when I made them. I've been putting a lot of effort into finding and curating material from past projects to showcase here, and expanding on them where I can with more pictures and writing about them than I've shared before. These include a couple photography projects, many more individual photos, and a few graphic designs I've made over the years.

New projects that I'm currently working on include more additions to my Microscope Stained Glass collection, some 3D modeling work I'm doing, and at least one more font (soon, enough to make a dedicated Fonts page). I'm always working on music and writing, but time will tell whether I make those available here as well.