What makes the cut when designing a new website.

The work that never makes the portfolio.

I've been rebuilding my website for months now, and the hardest part hasn't been the build. It's been deciding what to leave out.

Which sounds like a nice problem to have. It isn't, really. Once you start going through 25 years of work with the filter set to "would this look good on a homepage", you realise how much of the job gets caught in the sieve.

Most of what I do was never going to make it on there.

There's the monthly social content I produce on retainer for two clients. Steady, consistent, genuinely useful work that quietly runs all year and keeps a brand visible while nobody's watching the credits. There are the corporate videos full of charts and data, where the win isn't "look how cool this is", it's "nobody had to rewind it". There's the pitch work that never went anywhere, killed for reasons that usually had nothing to do with the work itself. And there's a decent chunk of projects I'm really proud of that live permanently behind an NDA.

None of it is portfolio worthy in the way the industry defines that phrase. All of it is the job.

We're all encouraged to lead with the biggest, boldest brand names, and fair enough, it works. A recognisable logo does more in half a second than a paragraph of explanation ever will, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't going to use mine. But there's a side effect. The work you actually spend most of your time on stays invisible, and the picture the industry paints of itself ends up a little distorted.

Designers starting out see the showreels and assume that's the whole of it. Clients see the showreels and assume that's what they're buying. Meanwhile the thing that keeps a freelance business upright is often the unglamorous stuff: the retainer that quietly renews, the deck that lands, the explainer that does its job so well nobody notices it was made by anyone at all.

I'm not sure there's a fix for it. A portfolio is a highlight reel by definition, and nobody wants to scroll through the eleventh version of a social edit. This site does what sites do. It shows the sharpest, most recognisable, most visually interesting things I'm allowed to show.

It just seems worth saying out loud, once, that it isn't the full picture. Not mine, and not anyone else's.

Anyway. You're already here, so have a look around at all the biggest, boldest projects I am allowed to show off.