Studio Missive 29: Behind the scenes of my own rebrand
Hi friend,
Happy Friday! Here’s what’s inspiring me this week and a behind the scenes look at my own rebranding.
What’s inspiring you?
- What’s the difference between a chip, a button, and a status label? This critique of chips and status labels is extremely my jam. I confess I have used all these in my design systems, and I’m not sure the design work is better for it.
- Use modern CSS to automatically build a typographic scale. This hurts my brain, but in a good way. Marvellous work.
- From the creators of Dark Sky: Acme Weather. Dark Sky was the only weather service I’ve ever used that accurately predicted and told the weather in my area, so I’m eager to hear how accurate this is. I love the aesthetics. They’re doing their own thing, and it’s fabulous.
What are you working on this week?
Get comfy with your favourite beverage, because this is going to take a while. This week, I was pulling at the threads of my own branding, and I feel it has finally come undone.
In the past couple months, I’ve written about my strategy, goals, and tactics for updating the studio website this year, along with adding more case studies and videos to the site. I’d like to dive deeper this week and share a larger update.
The first phase of this was repositioning myself. Naively, I assumed I could simply rewrite the home page and about page, add a couple service and sector sites, and leave the rest unchanged. In the past week, I finished the home page rewrite and repositioning, and started laying out the design. That’s when it hit me.
This whole studio needs a rebrand.
I have friends who will read this, and I can already see their eyes widening. In the next week, somebody will tell me to quit while I’m ahead. Rebrands are time-consuming and expensive. But I don’t believe you can change your brand’s posture without updating your brand’s aesthetics.
The last time I updated my branding and my website was January 3rd, 2020. (I know this because I tweeted about it on that date.) This was serendipitous timing: my new branding emphasized my skills as an executor just in time for COVID to create a gold rush for people with my skillset. I positioned myself as “a designer and developer who listens, responds to emails, does the work, and doesn’t suck.”
My business doubled in 2020. To be clear: I was very lucky.
Things have changed. In 2026, LLMs are increasingly becoming the executors. They’re fast and they’re cheap. They’re stealing business from template builders, and it’s become more apparent they’re stealing business from people like me. The more clearly you have positioned yourself as somebody who “gets it done,” the more likely COVID is eating your lunch.
I’m proud that my current branding and positioning has worked for over half a decade. In internet years, that’s at least two lifetimes. But it’s time for a change. I need to position myself as a strategic thinker. I want to get hired to think deeply and clearly about my clients’ futures, and design and develop the tools that get them where they want to go.
None of that is clear in my current branding or positioning.
This week, I designed a new home page and a new work index. Some elements of my existing branding will remain, and some will go. This is an evolution, not a replacement. It’s also still a work in progress: I have to design the About page and update my case studies as well, so there’s a lot of work to go, and things are bound to change. The copy isn’t finalized; some of what’s in these layouts is still boilerplate. But this seems as good a time as any to share a preview with you.
The new home page is a lot cleaner than what I have now. It’s more focused. There’s more copy, but it’s easier to read, and the positioning is very clear. (The hero image is going to be a video in real life, so use your imagination.)
It took me twenty iterations to get here.
The new case studies index was challenging. A good archive page is scannable, which helps display the breadth of work. But I also want to illustrate the depth of my thinking. There are two case study presentations on this page. One of them includes a more detailed description and a testimonial. The other reads almost like list, with a smaller thumbnail acting as a bullet.
It took me 26 iterations on this screen to find my happy place. If you squint, you’ll see I tried lots of obvious ideas, some interesting ideas, and many ideas that are evidently wrong. But they were all worth exploring.
I wanted to share the iteration count because, while my strategy and goals were clear before I began designing anything, it still took many iterations before I landed somewhere that visually felt right. LLMs, at least in their current state, can’t provide this level of thought (and I don’t think they’d arrive at this design). It all comes down to the grey matter in our skulls.
Next up? The About pages and some case study redesigns, and possibly some rewriting. There’s a lot to go, but the progress is good.
Until next time,
Nathan