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clearer digital brands.
Insights on web design, brand identity, digital content, and creative process.
A Field Guide to My Own Attention
Sensory gain, monotropic attention, a contested interoception literature, and a co-occurrence science that is barely a decade old. The personal experience opens the question; the research carries it.
The Excuse I Wanted to Be True
The internet keeps handing me a flattering fact: smart people are basically playful children. My whole working life looks like the evidence, which is exactly why I checked. The three cited sources don't prove it. What they support instead is quieter and better: a real, modest case for exploration, openness, and flow as a cognitive mode.
Designing for Two Readers
A pitch deck used to have one reader. Now it has two: the client, and the machine the client reads it through. On designing for both, and the older tension it dragged up, that the structure was always the real object and the surface just its face.
Introspection as R&D
Conscious thought is a thin surface over a much larger process. Watching that machinery, then testing what you see against a system you can instrument, is an underused and unusually fast way to learn how to build with AI.
How I find where a website loses people
My process for finding the moments a website quietly loses visitors. Why you can't see them from your own POV, how to inhabit a stranger and walk the site as them, and what to fix first.
The price talk is the last thing to fix
Pricing brand identity comes down to what you can sit with in the room. Two years of quoting the same number, what changed when someone finally said yes, and why the price talk is the last thing to fix.
I built an AI style guide of my own voice — here's what four rounds of edits taught me
Every best practice stacked onto the model still gave me a lifeless draft. What finally worked: rewriting it back into my own voice, then turning that difference into a style guide that sharpens with every article.
Obsidian Canvas as a brand strategy tool: my working setup
How I use Obsidian Canvas instead of FigJam to keep brand strategy work — and the file-ownership argument I'd defend against any FigJam loyalist.
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Occasional notes on websites, branding, content systems, and building a stronger digital presence.