I have launched a new home for my work, and building your own thing turns out to be a strange, revealing exercise. I would recommend it to any designer, though I am not sure they would thank me for it.
Because you cannot hide. There is no client to blame for the compromise, no committee that watered it down, no budget that ran out. Whatever ends up on the page is what you actually believe. If it is mediocre, that is a statement about you and nothing else.
So let me tell you what I left off, because that was most of the work.
There are no prices. Not because I am being coy, but because a number without a conversation tends to mislead. I would rather scope something honestly with a person than have them price themselves out of a thing they needed, or into a thing they did not.
There are no client logos in a grey row. I have never found that row says much, beyond the fact that other people also paid me.
There is no talk of passion, or of pushing boundaries, or of being a full-service creative partner in your journey. There is no stock photograph of anybody laughing at a laptop.
What is there is dark, and quiet, and mostly space, with one green that means act here and nothing else. The work, a way to reach me, and a sentence that says what I actually do.
It took me twenty years to have the nerve to make something that says so little. At twenty-five I would have filled every inch of it, to prove I was worth hiring. Most of my working life, it turns out, has been learning to leave the room a little emptier.