Research. Before writing or designing anything, I worked through a proper process to actually define my own tone, rather than guessing at it. That meant analysing real samples of my own writing across contexts, a work introduction, a text to a friend, an About page draft, a compliment response, an honest account of something that hadn't gone well, and working through a long set of direct and indirect questions about values, ambition, and self-perception. That research produced a genuine tone profile: growth as a near-unconditional value, competence stated as fact rather than claimed, warmth demonstrated through action rather than adjectives, and a preference for concrete nouns over vague category language. Everything written on the site afterwards was built against that profile, not guessed at fresh each time.

Brand & Visual Design. I made a deliberate choice to strip the site down to black and white, white text and hairlines on a black background, Josefin Sans as the only typeface, no accent colour competing with the actual work on display. That wasn't a default, it was a decision to let the projects themselves carry the visual interest rather than the site's own chrome. I designed the project browser's tab and grid system, the card layout for individual projects, and a consistent visual language, thin borders, generous spacing, uppercase micro-labels for categories, that repeats across every part of the site so it reads as one considered system rather than several different templates stitched together.

Development. I built every functional piece of the site as a custom component rather than relying on template defaults: a category-based project browser that filters cleanly across Photography, Brand & Social, Email, Website Design, and Motion & Film; a site search that matches on titles, descriptions, and near-misspellings so typos don't dead-end a search; a scrolling tagline for the homepage; PDF and PowerPoint viewers built directly into project pages so a real document or deck can be read in full without ever leaving the site or hitting a login wall; and an image carousel for landscape photography work. I gave particular attention to responsive behaviour across phone, tablet, laptop, and wide desktop, rebuilding layout logic more than once until it held up properly at every screen size rather than just the ones I happened to test first.