A Personal Website.
This is my third time redoing my personal website, in about twenty years of being a freelancing creative. Each time I did this, I have tried to really focus it as much as possible: every suggestion you get about building your online presence really stresses how important it is for it to be clear, very direct, and unambiguous about what you can offer to others. As a freelancer, your identity and your value are closely connected with your value proposition to your clients, and that means making sure they immediately know what you can offer them.
The home page of my previous website.
The trouble has always been with the fact that I have always had quite a lot of intersecting interests, and a unique ability to manage to never quite choose a singular focus on my creativity. My brain struggles with focus, and instead of fighting that, I have always tried to make the best of its ability to connect disparate realities together in a creative way.
This means that I have never really specialised in twenty years of work. I have worked as a journalist, filmmaker, photographer, event organiser, and musician. I helped build a non-profit organisation and held seminars. While doing each one of those things, I always thought they informed each other, that learning different craft helps each an overall quest to understand how to communicate and at the same time, how to learn.
This goes against a lot of the rules of freelancing. But rules and templates, as useful as they can be to find a path in a complex world, are kind of useless when your goal is to find your personal path. Eventually, you need to build your own thing, even if that goes against some common wisdom.
A picture of Questlove I took during one of the Roots Jams at the Highline Ballroom in New York City, 2009 (with the logo of my very first website).
So this website is meant to embrace all of my interests, and while it works as a portfolio for people to get to know what I can do, it’s meant also to showcase my interests and passions.
When you are lucky in life you get to work with good mentors, and you also find ones that you might never meet, but whose work inspires and guides you just as much. Amir “Questlove” Thompson is one of these people for me, and one thing that I have always admired about him is how he stresses that creative people should be at the same time authors and curators. This website is built around this idea: you will find my work in it, but also work that I admire, and my thoughts about that work.
This might make it harder for people to immediately know what I can do for them. At the same time, I trust that it might make it much easier to build deeper collaboration that will lead to great projects and ideas; and if it ends up inspiring you to do the same, all the better.
