When SoulGeek.com debuted in July of 2007 no other site looked quite like it.

 

It was kitschy. It was fun. It was retro. And why was the design of SoulGeek so unique? It was because Dino Andrade had designed it himself…

 

…and he had absolutely no idea what he was doing whatsoever. Not. A. Clue.

 

Dino not only had zero experience in building or designing websites, he had hardly spent much time on the net at all.  He didn’t even have a MySpace page which was the big thing at the time nor had he ever heard of the term “HTML” let alone knew what it meant.

 

Here ignorance was truly bliss mixed with a deep-seated need to make the site exist.

 

No art, design, or drafting software was used.  In fact, no computer was used at all.  Instead, Dino designed the entire site with graph paper and pencil.

 

Those designs were then scanned and sent to site developer Ernest Kent.  The use of a computer didn’t actually come into it until the developers had anything for Dino to look at.  At which point Dino captured screen grabs of the developer’s work and then used Corel Photo-Paint to either make notes on those screen grabs, or make mock-ups which combined the screen grabs layered over with more hand-drawn designs.

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Gathered together here are many of those original hand-drawn designs as well as a selection of the notated screen grabs, final and experimental site pages and elements.