Selling yourself

If you’ve visited my website in the last year or so, you may have found it strange that there are no case studies of my work anywhere on it. Despite being my main portal for explaining who I am and what I do, you can’t find a single example of my work.

I get weekly emails from different people in the design and dev community, asking why they can’t see my work. I’ve had it brought up in job interviews

It’s not because I have nothing of interest to show—far from it—in fact, I’m very proud of my work, and want to show it. But, I’ve always been a huge fan of long-form project explorations written by the likes of Teehan+Lax and Type/Code, so throwing a bunch of images onto the site without any copy was never going to be an option for me.

It’s not that I can’t write—I can throw together a blog post, and I regularly put together half-decent copy for my clients’ websites—it’s that I struggle to write about my work. The more I write about my process and what I did and why, the more detail I go into and the more pretentious my prose becomes. So much so, that I end up deleting it all and starting again.

To tell you the truth, there is a full case studies section of this website, designed and built in spurts over the last year and almost ready to go; but you can’t see it. There are lovingly art-directed pages with matching calls to action, integrated across the site. There are some great interactive elements and work examples, all interspersed between 74 paragraphs of text. All of this is hidden on the live site.

I’ve considered hiring a ghost writer multiple times, but while I’m not actively looking for work this seems like an unnecessary investment. And so, on a just-about-monthly basis I sit down and I write, and delete, and procrastinate, and rewrite until I’m bored and distracted and move on to other things.

One day in the future I might come up with something I’m happy with, but until then, this site will remain work-free while I continue to torture myself.