I’m proud to announce the all-new Parakeet website.

I want to start with a brief historical view of Parakeet’s online presence, then I’ll walk you though some of the key moments making the new website, and then lastly how it makes me feel having our work presented in this way.
A Short History
Luka and I opened Parakeet in early 2015 with the simplest website that was basically a business card: email address, phone number, and Twitter and Dribbble links. I often look back at this site and think that’s all a business website ever has to be. However, for something like Parakeet, it would be nice to fill our site with examples of our work, a portfolio.

But at the time, we had no portfolio to show for Parakeet yet. We had only just started working for our first client, Nike. For a time, Dribbble was our portfolio. With every new client, we added a new post to the Dribbble account. At some point, it became apparent we’d benefit from having our work showcased on our own website.
In late 2015, version 2 of the site resembled more of a slide deck than a business card. Patrick B. Gibson made the site, with a neat color-masking effect on the Parakeet logo. Each project had a near-fullscreen color background with work presented in the center. Most of the work was abbreviated for this format. If we made a set of 40 icons for a client, we picked 12 or 20 of our favorites and showed only those. In a way, this made the work more impactful, because it brought focus to maybe a single illustration without distracting the viewer with 3 alternate versions of it. We used this website for almost four years.

Over those four years, we worked with a lot of new clients, and as a result, the site started feeling less focused. The single list of “slides” was getting quite long, so we hired a firm to create a new website for us that would show full sets of icons on individual project pages. That was exciting for us, but it ultimately didn’t work out. The proposal was extremely complicated from our perspective, with various dependencies and a clumsy content management system.
Frustrated, I hastily built a new website myself, knowing what little HTML and CSS I could remember. But I wasn’t capable of building the site we envisioned. So version 3 showcased just a few of our favorite projects, like the Messenger icons, Instagram stickers, Barilla illustrations. Higher resolution artwork with punchy P3 color.

Never satisfied, I tried again in two years. For version 4, I built a website completely with 4-by-3-aspect-ratio images, making rows of icons from the same or similar projects, with little category tabs up top that would basically filter the page. Gone was the context of what clients these were for or when we made them, leaving just the artwork.

It’s Been Nine Years
I’ve never worked anywhere for as long as I’ve worked at Parakeet, and so I’ve never had to manage a single portfolio as big as this before. Trying to wrangle all of it into a nice, presentable state has been a challenge because Luka and I were often busy making things for clients. I had to make it a priority if it was ever going to be done right.
Up until now, every Parakeet site was fairly simplistic for one reason: I needed the ability to add pieces myself without bothering someone else. I’d compose a new portfolio piece in Photoshop, export a single image, add a line of code to the site, and publish it.
It was impractical to show everything because the work required would be astronomical. I mean, some of the icon sets we make for our clients have 900 icons in them. But it didn’t feel right to be constantly showing 12–36 icons for sets that huge. It wasn’t representing our work as well as it should have been.
I’m Not Great at Websites
Increasingly over the years, I’ve tried more and more to be responsible for my own sites, and though I feel like I’m getting better, I’m still not very good at it. In fact, I tried and gave up twice on this version of the website, once in 2021, and again in 2022.
But after I made LMNT, I had a renewed sense of confidence. I thought maybe I could do this. Maybe if I got help in some small areas, I could do it. The “most difficult” part of this website was creating a versatile format that worked for every project. I ended up made a “sheet” which would contain any amount of icons on it. Three, twelve, five hundred? No problem. Just one logo or one app icon? Sure.
But then I got to the actually-difficult part: populating these sheets with all of our artwork. If you know me, you know I despise a CMS. Every time I’ve worked with one, it’s been a colossal pain in the ass. Nothing is built for this, so why would I use it? The dependencies, the software updates, UI that might change over time, the possible vulnerabilities, and subscription fees—let’s just say it was a non-starter.
So I did what I’ve always done. I did it manually. I made the site by hand. I copied img line items and replaced the filename with a different one. Slowly, the illustration pages took shape. They looked good. I made simple hover states and active states so you could click every icon on the site. Because icons are meant to be clicked. It was satisfying, kind of in a fidget toy sense. I would just click around on the website whenever I was on the phone with someone.

The glyphs pages presented a serious challenge, because inline SVG code would let me style the icons dynamically with CSS. Is my hate for content management systems really justified? What I wouldn’t give to just drag all my SVGs into a window and have it just make the damn page for me.
Then my friend Johannes built basically that. As a macOS app. (Thank you, Johannes.) Fairly quickly, I can now dump hundreds of SVGs into it, and copy the SVG code for all of them, including the surrounding HTML specific to my website. This is maybe the first time ever that creating a contact sheet has felt easier in a browser than it has in Illustrator. I love that.

This Feels Terrific
Having our work displayed this way feels great. App icons are arranged like app icons on your devices. You can interact with them the same way you do on your devices. Instead of being bound to an arbitrary rectangle as a static image, they’re interactive. If you’re on a computer, you can hover your cursor on them and see a little spotlight that changes color from left to right. You can feel the app icon pull in the direction of your cursor and see the shadow move in the opposite direction, combining effects from AppleTV and iPad.


[Download the video.]

Our glyph projects are presented so you can see them in another color by hovering over them. You can click them and they become translucent. Each of them is set in a square container with divisions down the center to see how they’re drawn with their optical weight centered in the space. And you can finally see not just twelve of our favorites from a set, but the entire set. Scroll through all 285 Patreon icons or every one of the 876 icons we made for Notion. Compare similar neighboring icons with each other.
View our illustrative work larger than before, organized and displayed in the optimal way. Hover and click on them just like app icons and glyphs. The logos page features jumbo logos with deep saturated colors. Every one of them looks exactly as they should. Check the new Parakeet Primaries page, with all the icons sorted into categories for an easier browsing experience.
You know, one thing Parakeet has never done on our website is talk about ourselves. We’ve barely even mentioned our names, let alone a pitch. So for the first time ever, our website finally introduces us: Louie & Luka, an iconic duo.
Everything on this website was drawn by only me and Luka. We’re a two-person studio and sometimes people think we’re much bigger than that. I hope to write about some individual projects soon, to highlight the work each of us do, because a lot of it is worth discussing and dissecting.
Statistics
It may not be immediately apparent unless you peck around on the site, but 95% of it is new. That’s not hyperbole, our previous site only showed 5% of our total portfolio. So here are some statistics for you:

44 logos (up from 18)
96 app icons (up from 20)
1472 illustrations (up from 88)
3446 glyphs (up from 144)

This represents a massive increase in our public portfolio. There are over 5000 individual pieces, so I encourage you to look around and click on everything. With over 200 pages, even if you think you’ve seen it all, well, I sincerely doubt it.
A fun way of thinking about it is… if you spend 1 second looking at each icon and logo on our site, it would take you almost an hour and a half to look at it all. In short, there’s quite a lot.
But It’s Not Finished
And it won’t be for a little while. There are a couple client projects in progress. I still have to add link previews for all the individual pages, create error pages, and a few other nice-to-haves. I’m excited to work on those after I take a little break from it.

One last note I don’t think I’ve mentioned before yet, but for the first time since we started, our logo (her name is Rosita, by the way) had some small adjustments recently. Now is as good a time as any to show you the before and after.
If you want to upgrade your old Parakeet t-shirt, here are the new ones: logo on pastel, logo on blue, and wordmark on blue.

Thank you for reading. This new website is really important to both of us, and we’re very proud of the result. As always, if you need an app icon or set of glyphs or a logo, please feel free to contact us. We’ve love to work with you.

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