When I started out as a freelance designer in the early-2000s, I had one website where I posted client work, solicited new business, and put up badly recorded music from my university flat — all on the same page, with no sense that this was unusual. The client work and the music were both just things I made. The site was just the place I put them.
Somewhere along the way I convinced myself that a professional web presence and a personal one were incompatible things. That the music didn’t belong next to the client work. That the professional version of me needed its own clean surface, and everything else should find somewhere else to go. The personal stuff stopped. The joy went with it. I didn’t fully notice until I’d been without it long enough that I’d stopped expecting it to be there.
This site is the attempt to put it back.
Building websites seemed to get a lot harder for a long time, but now seems to be getting easier again: CI/CD, more capable browsers, AI-assisted coding that lets me work at a pace I simply couldn’t before. Building your own site is possible again in a way it wasn’t. I also care less about perfection than I used to. This isn’t a portfolio. It’s the version of me you’d get if we were hanging out — my music collection, the books I like, some workish stuff. Someone who made his first website twenty-five years ago, enjoying making a website again.
The homepage is built from the lowest-level components the web provides: text, colour, and space. Elsewhere I try to let the content set its own terms. The photo essays are art-directed pieces designed around the photographs. The guestbook is an homage to the electronic dictionaries my friends and I all spent too much money on during the Japanese degree I did — devices made for one thing, that did that one thing beautifully, where the technology felt entirely on your side. They were also the interface to a language we’d spent years living inside, which is a different relationship than admiring the hardware. I’ve thought about those dictionaries more than is probably warranted. Building the guestbook was partly an excuse to finally do something with that thought. The library does the same from a different direction: a borrowing catalogue presented like the terminals that used to run the town library where I grew up — the right frame for the collection, but also something fun and slightly silly.
Making things again is fun. I’ve spent most of the last fifteen years in design leadership: setting direction, developing designers, watching the work happen one or two hops away from the work itself. I don’t regret that — the impact of that work is meaningful, but there’s something you can only get by building stuff, and you can’t get it by proxy. This site is partly a way back in to that.
The site pulls in live data at build time: music from Last.fm with cover art from iTunes, posts from Bluesky, photos with EXIF and tide data, an RSS feed from my newsletter, my book library from Hardcover, and some miscellaneous stuff on the now page. The web at its best is things connected and talking to each other. A site that’s alive — that reflects what I’m actually listening to, what I posted this week — is more interesting than a static one, mostly for me, but perhaps for the people who end up here for whatever reason, too.
I remember when the internet felt like something we were building together — what it could mean, what it should be. I think that question is back open and this website is me taking part.