My First Page
My first webpage, built during a practical training at WebScotland, a web agency in the UK — the first time I ever made websites. My skillset was very basic, but looking back I’m struck that I appreciated absolute simplicity even then: a few small boxes and checkmarks floating in the middle of the screen — linX, brainworX, contaXt, X — offered in both a Flash and an HTML version. I don’t know anymore how I came up with any of it, but I still like it.
Enter the siteThe Bird Site (Papageien)
Made after I started studying design at Fachhochschule Aachen, to collect the first outputs I liked — logos and other pieces. I wanted a website that didn’t follow the standard conventions: a collage built in Photoshop, a bit like a Rorschach image, full of parrots and hidden links, with popup windows the way sites had back then. No Dreamweaver this time — I was just figuring the code out myself. I still appreciate the creativity of it, and how it all came together.
Enter the sitePeacebear
A side project from my university years, running alongside the portfolio sites: Peacebear gegen Krieg — a teddy bear against war. One staged picture a day, from October 2004 into January 2005, each month a single long scroll of plain HTML. The bear wandered through toy sets and photo collages while the news was full of war, and then the story quietly stopped after a January picture. It lived in its own corner of tamimswaid.de — the robots.txt of the later sites still remembers it: Disallow: /peacebear.
Enter the siteThe Green Portfolio
„Nur Designer können, was Designer können“ — a quote from my professor Dieter Rehder, who has since passed away. Rest in peace, Dieter. I was reading blogs and other people’s sites, and wanted something I could actually maintain and change along the way — which the collage never allowed. It was also my first experiment with a logo expressing my name in an Arabic calligraphy style, probably one of the nicer parts of it. The green was quite an interesting choice too.
Enter the siteMe, Framed
This time I put myself in the center: a picture I made of myself, the same quote placed on my chest. Built on the previous site, but more harmonic, typographically nicer — still thought of like a blog; along the way the logo gained a rectangle around it (the files date that to March 2008). Then CoboCards happened, my startup baby, and the site stayed as it was; later I consulted at nexum as a UX designer, an update stalled, and there wasn’t much new work I needed to show. So one website stood for eight years, and by the end it had turned white and carried an apologetic note: “This site is old. I know.”
Enter the siteJust the Facts
Working at nexum, I didn’t need a complex website anymore — my creative output lived on Instagram. So this went back to the very basics: almost a CV, a digital business card, the old design elements gone. tamimat had been my internet name for a long time by then — my Gmail was set up that way early on, and Instagram and Twitter followed. In May 2014 I finally made the URL match it too: I found the Austrian .at ending cool, tamim.at was free, so I got it. That was the trigger for this site — though the files tell on me: I had started this page back in April 2011, one day after backing up the old site, and it stalled for three years until the domain finally shipped it. As simple as possible, and I always liked the black and red.
Enter the siteThe Yellow Years
Around the end of 2015 I moved to the USA and rethought how I presented myself professionally. A very simple CV I had made for job applications became the model for the site, and my new logo — a reintegration of Arabic calligraphy — became its foundation. It kicked off as a bare draft — Times New Roman and those black-and-white glyph-emojis (◓ ◐ ◒) that ship with the typeface itself, found material I loved reusing — and from there it evolved into the yellow page.
A lot of work went into this one, especially the portfolio I built to show my work as a product designer — I even had my English and the portfolio itself proofread. And for the first time I didn’t code everything myself: the design was mine, but I found someone to put the HTML and CSS together, and after making the logo animation in HTML5 (the files say Tumult Hype), I hired someone to integrate it properly — JavaScript loading bar and all. It served me well in the States: when someone asked about me, I could point to something I found fun and cool. I still love that GIF of my face with the shadow, the way it vibrates.
Enter the site