“Sober, plainspoken, no hype — beat fear with information.”
— signaltrace-site,
content-strategy/strategy.md
What this looks like for me
Design is where this CV starts, chronologically. Before the quant work and the agent pipelines there were 20 years of WordPress sites, WooCommerce stores, custom child themes, brand pages built from SCSS rather than a page builder. yourdesign.co.za is still up as a record of that era — the stack list reads 2018–2020 (LAMP, jQuery, Bootstrap / Foundation, Photoshop), but the habits survived: custom work over off-the-shelf themes, opinionated typography, a default of hand-built CSS.
Most of what I’d put forward as current design work is the visual layer on my own projects rather than client brand books. The signaltrace-site landing page is hand-authored — ~29 KB of markup, a locked palette (Charcoal #171321, Tanuki orange #fc6d26, orange hover #e24329, light grey #dcdcde), Inter + JetBrains Mono, forced light mode, custom graph-modal sizing. The same instinct shows up in how the Eden Fintech and DevAI sites present themselves: narrative first, palette disciplined, claims grounded.
I don’t think of myself as a branding specialist, but design has been the constant across every piece of work here. A lot of the engineering projects ship with the UI and the site already worked out — that’s the practical end of it.
Projects that back this
- yourdesign.co.za — 20+ years of WordPress / WooCommerce client work including Nimue Skin Technology, the Woolworths Mother’s Day campaign (via Flume), and the ongoing freelance portfolio.
- signaltrace-site — hand-authored landing page, locked palette, custom Quartz overrides.
- 2023 cover-letter one-pager (visual CV) — single-page two-column visual layout. Serves as a voice and biographical reference rather than a shipped product.
Decisions that shaped how I do it
More decision pages planned — this hub will pick up backlinks as they land.
What I’m usually asked to do
- Design and build a small marketing or project site from scratch rather than adapt a template
- Lock a visual identity — palette, typography, core layout components — for a research or product site
- Take an existing site and strip it back to something plainer and more defensible
- Do the design work alongside the engineering on a small product launch so the two don’t drift