THIS SITE
Every other project here is finished work. This one is the vessel that carries them: how the site was modelled, designed, and built, and why it looks the way it does.
ROLE
Concept, creative direction, content model and copy. The design, the build and the drafting ran through AI tooling with me directing every pass: brief, review, exception list, repeat. The same way I run production teams, applied to a team of machines.
PROBLEM
A portfolio here has to prove two claims at once: creative direction and systems thinking. It also has to stay alive after launch. If adding work means touching code, a site quietly stops being updated. And it had to stand apart in a field where most portfolios look like each other, without borrowing anyone else’s world.
PROCESS
The content model came first. Every project and note is a record with the same fields, and the pages are readers of that data, so publishing new work is data entry rather than development. The design system runs on a small set of rules: three type voices, a spacing and timing scale built on the Fibonacci sequence, one red that has to be earned, two media classes, two media widths. Everything repeatable became a rule. Everything that could not justify itself was cut. When the design froze, the rules were written down as four documents: the laws, the build specification, the render architecture, and the validation plan. Production was translation: every exact value sampled from the frozen prototype, nothing changed without a ruling.
TEMPLATE LOGIC
Two media classes, two widths, a density budget, and layout driven by data: any future project lays out correctly from its fields alone.
VALIDATION
The template acceptance test ran the layout at three, eight and twenty plates, and the fixed rules held at every count. The rest of the build answers to a written validation plan before the domain cutover: performance budgets as numbers, keyboard and screen-reader passes, a reduced-motion map walked item by item, and a dark-room check on two screens for the blacks. The site launches when the checklist is signed.
THE WORLD
The site is built as a small world with its own story: a raven seal, three colours with an old provenance, titles that travel instead of dying, an eye that watches back. None of it is explained in the site’s copy; it is built to be felt first and found later. The full notes on the world live in the colophon, behind the seal in the footer.
OUTCOME
The site you are reading is the outcome. It runs on the discipline it documents: seven projects and a journal publishing from one model, a design system that lays out any future project by data alone, and a set of rules strong enough to argue with. The model lives in plain files in the repository, and publishing is a commit. The world stays.