About
I’m Matthew Lyon, and this is my website.
As a kid, I wanted to be an architect, and make beautiful spaces for people to live and work in.
But I had undiagnosed ADHD, a predilection towards depression, and tend to learn things in a manner that schools don’t accommodate. I couldn’t learn Calculus the way they wanted to teach it to me, and an internship at an architectural studio made me realize my dream wasn’t what I thought it was. So I studied art instead, and learned to talk about abstract things.
I did some meandering. I started Invoke Arts with my parents, learned how to program computers so I could better manage the inventory, then gave the business to them, moved from California to the Pacific Northwest, and started working in technology, where over the course of 20 years I’ve worked at a variety of companies big and small. These days I’m consulting.
There I had the first real crack in the negative self-esteem that had built up from non-diagnosis, bullying, and more. I met my partner, and started a family. I taught myself how to make music, played with generative art, and have focused my technology work on human/computer interaction design, which I view as making beautiful software spaces for people to work in.
This website is a work in progress, like all websites are, but I’m not going to put an under construction gif here. I’m working on moving it towards more of a digital garden format.
Typography & Iconography
The Typefaces on this website are Valkyrie, Concourse, and Triplicate by Matthew Butterick. The icons are primarily from Phosphor, and a few from Remix.
Photography & other images
Unless otherwise noted, all images on this site are created by myself. I have been making photographs since age 8, have otherwise considered myself an artist since my teenage years, and consider image support as much a part of my voice as my writing.
Technologies
This website is created from flat files using custom code to render html pages from markdown files in Obsidian. I intend to eventually extract that code and share it.
Previously, I used Astro to organize and render pages, MDX to organize and render writing, and CSS Modules to handle styling. Search functionality is provided by Pagefind, and I’ll typically pursue other interactivity via Web Components or Solid.
The source code is not available right now as there have been assets checked into the source repository I cannot redistribute — I intend to publish the source code after scrubbing those assets.
I’ve been making websites since 1995, first creating a personal site in Notepad.exe. I’ve played with a lot of technology for doing so over the years, and for my desires this technology stack hits the right balance. I’ve worked in print design, loved the lush layouts of the magazines of yore, and believe the web has more potential than what Markdown alone can provide. Besides, there is more to representing ideas than text.