You Have to Start Making Decisions

Otherwise, you're just listing options.

Photo by Markus Spiske

Towards the end of last year, I started thinking about building a new website for myself. Not just another vanity site (although I’ve built plenty of those), but more of an archive of the various things I’ve done over my career and a hub where I can share stories around what I’m thinking about and what I’m working on that aren’t dependent on The Algorithm. After years of inconsistent, and if I’m being honest, fairly half-hearted efforts to play the social media game, I’m finally done. I have no more interest in chasing likes or followers or the ever-elusive “brand deal.” I just want to make stuff in my quiet little studio and write about what I make — but also, and maybe more importantly, about what others are making, doing, and thinking about. In fact, in many ways, I kind of want my making to be a byproduct of what others are making, and maybe that includes you.

I approached my website redesign in much the same way that I start most other design projects, with questions. What am I trying to say? What’s my inspiration, my motivation? How do I want the thing to feel? While I was working on answering some of those questions, a quote came up in one of my feeds by Thomas Keller of The French Laundry that goes, “I think that you’ve got to make something that pleases you and hope that other people feel the same way.” It’s a simple quote, nothing excessively profound or revelatory — and it’s ostensibly about making food — but I saw it at just the right time and it resonated. It also got me thinking about quotes, which I’ve loved since I was a kid. In fact, when I was in junior high, my mom got me the third edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, which I think I still have in a box somewhere. What I love about quotes is that they’re like tiny bits of insight into how someone sees or moves through the world and the really good ones stay with you, at least they do for me.

With that in mind, I thought that it would be cool to include some sort of random quote widget in the sidebar of my new site to share some of my favorites. The problem I ran into was that most of the available quote plugins, at least the ones that I found, just aren’t that great. They do the job, I guess, but none of them look very good, which is important to me. I had been toying with AI and thought that maybe I could use it to help me build the plugin that I wanted to see on my site. I did a few mockups in Affinity, outlined a feature set that met my needs, and started prompting. I was just using the free versions, which time out pretty quickly, especially writing code. But since this was just an experiment, I didn’t feel the need to purchase a subscription yet. A week or so later, I had a working version of Quotatious installed on my local WordPress dev site. It looked great and had a ton of options for things like colors, typography, border radius, drop shadow, and icon styles. I even added a function that cycles the background colors of the widget, so not only do you get a different quote on each page refresh, you also get a different background color. It’s a little thing, but I think it helps the site feel fresh for repeat visitors and for people reading multiple posts in one sitting.

With Quotatious under my belt, I wondered what else I could build for the site. Since I was approaching my site as an archive, I thought, “What if I came up with a way to sort and filter what would ultimately be hundreds of posts?” Just as I did with Quotatious, I started with mockups in Affinity and a list of features and functionality. A couple weeks later, I had a working version of Quaero on my dev site. And just as I had done with Quotatious, I built in color palettes, dropdowns, sliders, and spinners to control various visual aspects of the plugin.

I was really enjoying the process of building things that were not for the express purpose of monetization. It’s something I’ve been working on in therapy and these plugins were the first real chance to actually put some of those new tools and realizations to work. With that in mind, I thought, What’s next?” I’m old enough to remember something called a “blogroll.” Some of you may remember them, but for those of you who don’t, pull up a chair and I’ll tell you a story. Long ago, before social media took over the entire online experience, people used to write blogs, which is short for “weblog” — basically a collection of entries known as “posts.” A blogroll was simply a collection of links to other blogs, usually in the sidebar. It was a way of recommending sites you found interesting to your site visitors, without having to write an entire post around it. Just a quick, “Hey, I like this and you might too.” Substack has a similar feature they call Recommendations — and it’s basically the same thing. It’s a link and a sentence or two telling subscribers why they might like that particular newsletter. I think it’s a terrific feature because it gives some insight into what the person you’re following finds interesting — and I have been introduced to countless interesting things from blogrolls and Substack Recommendations over the years.

Luceo is a visual update to the classic blogroll. It’s got the same basic functionality — a carousel of links to interesting things — just reimagined to be a bit more visual, rather than solely text-based. I approached the development just as I had with the other two plugins, but at one point during the build, I realized that I had lost the throughline of what Luceo wanted to be. This “simple” plugin had grown to nearly 40 controls for layout, aspect ratio, padding, border radius, font size, line-height, shadow controls, borders, and various color options. At one point, I told the AI, “I feel like a mechanic, not a designer.” Its response was cutting, but spot on. “At some point you have to start making decisions. This work no longer feels like design — it feels like engineering around complexity.” Ouch. But as much as that comment stung, as I said, it was spot on.

While I still wasn’t thinking about monetization, I had decided to make the plugins available for free, so I was thinking about a potential audience and what they might want, rather than making decisions around what I wanted. I needed to take a step back and regroup. For the next couple weeks, I looked over all of the work that I had done, trying to figure out where I had come off the rails and the only thing that all three plugins had in common was feature creep, which led to unnecessary complexity. I didn’t want a plugin that I had to spend a bunch of time fiddling with to get it to look the way I wanted it to, so why did I expect that an audience would? The thing I kept coming back to was that I fell victim to the trope of “more is always better,” a philosophy that has sort of come to define capitalism — and just as an aside, it’s something I also did on the first and second editions of my book, Photography by the Letter.

“You have to start making decisions.” For two weeks that phrase lived rent-free in my head. The first thing I needed to do was to rethink the plugins as pieces of intentional design, not just collections of control panels. I designed a preset system that was implemented across all three plugins, which created a consistent visual rhythm. Each preset style sets multiple parameters with just a click and while the settings are different for each style, they feel similar, cohesive. “Compact,” “Balanced,” and “Spacious” reduced dozens of arbitrary controls to just a few intentional design systems — and that shift would prove to be a catalyst, of sorts, but more on that in a minute. Aside from choosing an accent color, there are just a few select overrides as exceptions that offer purposeful character, rather than simply adding complexity. With fewer choices for the end user came deeper intention — and a clearer voice. My voice. Well, mine and Dieter Rams’, whose “less, but better” mantra had been on heavy rotation in my head since the beginning, but somehow got lost in the shuffle.

In the end, these plugins didn’t just help me rebuild my website — they helped me rebuild a little trust in myself. In my taste. In my instincts. In the idea that making fewer, better decisions can lead to stronger, more meaningful work. Less control. More clarity. Less noise. More intention. And for the first time in a long time, that feels like exactly enough.

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